30. Home Away From Home

2019 December 24
Tuesday

The cell corridor’s gotten cluttered since they stashed Will, Oliver and Raphael down here almost two months ago. Sponsors who’d gotten used to interacting with their charges in the relative comfort of the common area suddenly had to reacclimate to what is essentially a concrete hole in the ground, and immediately decided that the stacking chairs and folding tables usually piled at the far end absolutely would not do. So Pippa picks her way past a pile of board games shoved untidily against the wall, manages not to disturb the forest of empty paper coffee cups that are forming a decomposing lump on a table she recognises as having been borrowed from upstairs, and hopes that when it comes down to it, it’s not her who has to clean all this mess up.

Maria follows her with inevitable grace. She’s regained all her former composure and then some, and no sign remains of the assault that put her in the hospital and the two men they’ve come to visit back in the cells. She is, once again, the woman Pippa always imagines when she thinks of her, a source of reassuring solidity in the foundations of Pippa’s world.

There’s a couch at the end of the corridor, amid other out-of-place accoutrements, and Pippa sits. Performs automatically the checks required of her before she speaks casually in such an environment: the cameras are on, the intercom hooked up to the cells is off, and the drapes, added to the rails in front of the glass cell doors to afford the inmates some privacy, are drawn closed.

“I still think this is too early,” she says.

“You’ve been saying that for a week now,” Maria says, catching up and leaning against the wall next to the couch. How she doesn’t knock over the stack of tupperware containers right by her feet, Pippa doesn’t know; she didn’t even look! “We can’t keep them in here any longer. We try to emphasise the ‘unusual’ in ‘cruel and unusual’.”

“You don’t think reintroducing them could be disastrous for Will? Or Adam?”

Maria raises an eyebrow. “You think Aaron’s immune to their charms?”

“Well, yes.”

“Me too, actually. But Edy’s taking care of Adam and Tabby’s babysitting Will and we’ll lock them in their rooms tonight. It’ll be fine, Pippa.”

“I hope so.”

“We might be a little rusty on rough intakes, but it hasn’t been that long since yours.”

Pippa nods. And if she shudders for a moment, it’s probably from the breeze caused by the air conditioning. “Yeah,” she says.

“I notice you didn’t express concern for Martin.”

“Maria,” Pippa says, “I have no idea what on Earth is going on with that boy.”

Maria shrugs. “Pamela says he’s doing better. Sometimes they just… go into a black hole. The sponsor helps them out of it.”

“I still don’t understand how she can even look at him, after—”

“It’s what’s best for both of them. She had to move on. He had to change. And if she wasn’t involved — deeply, personally involved — she’d have carried that hate around for the rest of her life. She sees him now and, thank the bloody saints, so does he. God help them both, they rather like each other now.”

“What, like—?”

“No, Pippa,” Maria says quickly. “Definitely not like that. They’re more like sisters now. More like you and Steph.”

Pippa can think of several things to say in response — primarily she wants to fight back against the notion that what she has with Steph could be at all similar to any kind of relationship someone could have with Martin — but the arrival of Jane and Harmony, decked out in their padded jackets and with holstered tasers and remarkably casual expressions, interrupts her. She’s fond enough of Jane and Harmony but she doesn’t know them near as well as she does Maria, has been more talked at than with in her time with them, so it’s best, for now, that she keep her opinions to herself, even if she still doesn’t understand how Ella can work with Martin after he hit her best friend’s husband with his car.

Although she does sort of get the desire to remove his balls.

“You know,” Jane says, “the literature would have you believe that being force-feminised is an opportunity to attend glamorous galas, become a world-famous model, or pick up hotties on the beach, not hang around in dingy concrete basements pointing tasers at people. And the outfits?” She adjusts the collar on her puffy coat. “Yeesh.”

“The literature?” Pippa asks. “What literature?”

“C’mon, Pip… The literature.”

Shaking her head, Pippa says, “I really don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“I do,” Maria says, as Harmony laughs. “Can we please just get ready?”

“Yes, Maria,” Jane and Harmony say in chorus.

Pippa stands just in time to catch the bulky, long-range taser Harmony throws to her — Maria catches the one thrown by Jane — and registers her thumbprint, checks the charge and assumes the ready pose. She and Maria nod their readiness and Jane hits the button that grinds the tiny, cheap motors on the curtain rails and exposes Raph and Ollie’s cells. As aftermarket additions to the basement go, the drapes aren’t the most elegant.

She can see Raph but not Ollie from where she’s standing, and she wonders for a moment what would happen if one or both of them were to make a run for it, how far they would get before taser darts hit them in the back, what the sound would be like when they hit the floor.

No. Inappropriate, Pip. You’re supposed to be reforming everyone you bring down here, not just the ones you like.

She glances at the cell that once held Declan. Everyone who isn’t an effing rapist, she amends.

When she looks back, Raph’s noticed her, is peering at her through the glare on the glass with interest. He looks more or less like he did on the surveillance: like the Raph from before, but shrunk in most dimensions. He shrugs with one shoulder and one eyebrow, a gesture that’s so Jane-like Pippa has to stop herself from reciprocating.

And then Monica’s here, too, in an even bulkier jacket, and it’s time. Pippa and Maria take their positions towards the back, tasers aimed, and Jane and Harmony stand closer. It’s Monica who’ll open the cells, but before she does so, Harmony speaks up.

“Oliver,” she says, “how are you feeling this morning?”

He grunts at her. The amplification system that lets them communicate through the reinforced glass door gives it a scratchy, guttural sound.

“Oliver,” Harmony repeats, allowing impatience to sharpen her voice, “answer me.”

Pippa can see both boys now, and when Ollie responds it’s a chance to look at him properly, too. He sits up on his cot, discards the sheet covering his naked upper body, and Pippa can’t stop her breath catching in her throat: he’s still hurting himself.

Should he even be in the cells at all? Is it doing more harm than good?

She remembers Edy explaining it to her over lunch one day, that in cases like his and Raphael’s, with men who have difficulty controlling their temper and who are easily led, a month or more in the cells after a violent incident is standard. A baseline for punishment is thus established, and it’s made clear to the subject that future infractions will mean more time in the cell. And if Ollie’s still hurting himself, that’s unfortunate, but at least his choice of targets can’t be faulted.

“But I was violent,” Pippa had said. “I was never given anything like this much cell time.”

“Oh, honey,” Edy had replied, “you tried to hit Eleanor in the stomach, you missed, and then you broke down crying at her feet. You were never like them.”

Harmony raps on the door rather than repeat her question again, and Pippa reminds herself that Oliver is not her problem, that Harmony’s done this before, that she has the backing of even more experienced sponsors; that she’s Ollie’s best chance.

“What?” Ollie says.

“How are you feeling?” Harmony repeats, enunciating with deliberate care.

“What does it matter?” Ollie says.

“Because it’s Christmas Eve, Oliver,” Harmony says. “It’s the time for happiness and joy and peace and love and everything.”

“I don’t care.”

“And we’re fed up of visiting you in this place. It’s a bit depressing, don’t you think?”

Ollie sneers. “Out of one concrete box, into another. All the same.”

From the other cell, two doors down, Raph yells, “Will one of you please get him to stop fucking whining?”

Pippa directs a look at Maria; Raph shouldn’t ordinarily be able to hear all this. Maria nods at the microphone array above each cell door, which Pippa takes to mean that the full loop has been switched on, that this is intentional. She nods. Raph always was a little more tractable, a little less in thrall to Declan, to Will. She supposes she shouldn’t be second-guessing any of this; Jane and Harmony have been strategising their approach for weeks, dragging Monica and Edy in sometimes.

“Fuck you, Raph!” Ollie shouts, and then there’s nothing but yelling for almost half a minute. Monica eventually quiets them both by shutting off the circuit.

“This is another reason we’re not concerned about releasing them back to the others,” Maria whispers. “They hate each other.”

 

* * *

 

Steph’s a little worried. She’s not entirely sure why; Will’s reintroduction went relatively smoothly, despite Adam’s — entirely reasonable — outburst, and since then he’s been quiet, thoughtful, and very careful. But, on the other hand, why were Ollie and Raph kept in the cells longer than him, if not because they’ve been uncooperative? Maybe there is something to fear from them that there wasn’t from Will?

Except, she corrects herself — again; she’s been running her brain in circles all morning as she thinks about this, or, if one were to believe Aaron’s baseless teasing, she’s been ‘shitting everywhere like a nervous gazelle’ — that Ollie and Raph are followers, not instigators. It was Declan who came for Steph and Aaron in the showers, and it was Will who planned and took the lead in the attack on Maria. And neither of those two men is available to follow any more: Declan has vanished to parts unknown — “And with the exact configuration of his parts also unknown,” Aaron pointed out over breakfast, miming what Steph thinks was probably supposed to be a penis removal surgery with his fingers — and Will’s sitting right here in the room with them, curled up on a bean bag chair against the farthest wall, intent on his book and paying no-one much attention, a far cry from the man he used to be. If Ollie and Raph do somehow fall in behind him again, they’ll end up reading — Steph squints to read the title of Will’s book — the same baking romance novel series that briefly entertained her a little while ago.

It makes sense to not be worried! Look at Will! He doesn’t even sit the way he used to! And he certainly doesn’t lecture them all on whatever thoughts have recently passed through his head, which was once a daily occurrence; Tabby complained to Steph that Will’s voice had been so loud it was a wonder he hadn’t been faintly audible in the offices of the Almsworth Missing Persons Unit. Thank God, Tabby had said, that it is understaffed.

But she’s worried anyway, even if she has no rational reason to be, and so she’s seeking comfort, half-sitting and half-lying on one of the couches, with Aaron close to her. He’s nervous, too, despite his ribbing; they decided after much discussion that they wouldn’t hide their developing relationship, that tiptoeing around their affection for each other would quickly grow tiresome, and that given Will’s reaction to their coupling had been simply to roll his eyes and mutter, “Yeah, that sounds about fucking right,” they don’t anticipate any serious trouble from Ollie and Raph. And if there is, that’s what all the women with tasers are for.

They’ve tidied for this day, put away most of the bean bags — Jane said they were starting seriously to impair her ability to get around the basement without tripping, and she also said that she’s regularly quite well-armed and so people should listen to her when she drops hints — and angled the couches by the TV so they’re both facing towards the empty area by the doors to the lunch room, which is where the stools for Ollie and Raph’s reintroduction have been set up. On the other couch, Edy and Adam are sat together on one end, talking quietly together, and Pamela sits at the other. Martin, for some reason, sits on a cushion on the floor, cross-legged and looking for all the world like he has nowhere else to be.

The man’s still a mystery, one Steph has yet to solve. Not her fault; she’s been busy.

“Fuck this,” Aaron says, drawing out the opening consonant and breaking the silence loudly enough that Adam jumps. “Can we please just get this farce over with? We all know how it’s going to go: they’ll shuffle the Brothers Dipshit into the room, we’ll all gawk at them, they’ll gawk at us, they’ll call us pussies, and then one of them will try something horrifically violent, fail miserably at it, and dribble on the floor for a while with more taser darts sticking out of them than an acupuncturist has needles. Let’s just do it, and then they can go back to the cells and we can get on with the important business of, uh, what is it we do here, Edy?”

“Make bad-taste references to the time our friends got injured,” Edy says.

“Right. Shit. Sorry. Should’ve thought of that.”

“Maybe we can try hoping that their time in the cells has caused them to reconsider their actions,” Edy suggests.

“Now you’re just being silly.”

“Nervous, Aaron?” Martin asks, leaning his head on the sofa cushion next to his sponsor’s crossed legs.

“Absolutely not.”

Martin nods. “You’re nervous.”

“Don’t be insightful, Moody. It’s creepy.”

Frowning, Martin says, “Don’t call me that.”

“Why not? You still only have one mood. It’s just a different one.”

“Because it’s not—”

Martin’s interrupted by Pamela’s hand on his shoulder, and she leans down to whisper in his ear. He nods, reaches up to pat her hand in thanks, and smiles at Aaron.

“What just happened?” Aaron asks.

“Never you mind,” Pamela says to him, and she shifts on the couch, creating room for Martin, who climbs up to join her. “Stephanie, can you get him to shut up for a minute?”

“Sorry,” Steph says, and tightens the arm she has around Aaron’s belly. “Sometimes he just talks.”

“You could put a hand over his mouth.”

“Now, listen here, Ella…” Aaron says. “Ella…” He twists around in Steph’s grip to face her. “What’s her last name?”

“Cunningham,” Steph whispers.

“Listen here, Ella Cunningham—”

“Pamela,” Pamela says. “Or Pam.”

“Okay?”

“Everyone calls me Ella. I’m tired of it.”

Aaron tries again. “Pamela Cunningham—”

“Pam,” Tabby says, from her place at one of the tables, “you’re not thinking of changing your name again, are you?”

“I’m just tired of it,” Pamela repeats. “And you’re not one to talk.”

“I’ve had the same name for nine years—”

“Think of the paperwork, Ella,” Edy says.

“What was I even saying?” Aaron says.

“You were trying to be performatively outraged,” Pamela says, and Martin giggles.

“Steph,” Aaron says, looking at her once again, “please kidnap me away from here.”

She just hugs him harder.

God, she’s glad to be here. It still seems absurd sometimes, when she remembers that there’s solid concrete on all sides and a whole other level of basement before the ground floor, when she remembers that everyone she sees from day to day is in some way trapped here, whether literally or through obligation. But she’s found a sister here in Pippa, and many more women she’s becoming close to, and she met Aaron…

…who is, right now, making rude gestures at Martin. She’s missed the conversation, she realises, but that’s probably for the best, and the bickering has served to deflate some of the tension. All the same, when the door from the corridor opens and everyone suddenly shuts up, she fights the urge to rearrange herself, to unwrap herself from Aaron, to sit up straight and cis, to be normal, and that’s an unpleasant reminder of her life before, when she was alone and spent every day pretending to be a boy, pretending to cope, pretending to live.

Ollie enters first and glares at her, so she glares right back at him and resolves to blame him and him alone for inspiring such impulses in her. She can resent him for it rather than give herself any more shit.

He stops in his tracks, like he’s seen something in her he doesn’t understand and wants to examine, and Steph has the strangest desire to stick her tongue out at him, to tease him, to egg him on. Here, alone amongst them all, he doesn’t look intimidating any more. He looks small. Weak.

Without breaking eye contact, she rests her chin in Aaron’s hair, makes clear her allegiance and her affection, to prove to herself she isn’t scared; to claim him in front of Ollie and Raph: mine.

“What the fuck happened while we were locked up?” Ollie says, still looking at her.

Raph, who’d stopped in the doorway to take in the room, looks at Steph for only a brief moment before shaking his head and continuing on, bumping into Ollie’s shoulder hard enough to make the man stagger. From the way Ollie rears up from his slouch and raises his hand, it doesn’t seem like it was an accident, nor does it seem like the first time one of them’s antagonised the other.

Harmony clears her throat and gestures with her taser, and Ollie transfers his glare to her for a dangerous second before rolling his shoulders forward once more. He lets her direct him to one of the stools. Raph sits at the other, a few metres away.

They look reduced, both of them, the way Will did when they let him out. Will said they restricted his calories considerably while he was in there, which he initially took to be a method of control but soon realised was intended to thin him out and reduce his muscle mass. And he didn’t say it out loud, but Steph’s pretty sure Will knows that now he’s started putting the weight back on it will be in more… appropriate places. She squints at Raph and Ollie, wondering if the process has started for them, too. Raph’s the tidier of the two, wearing the usual Dorley-issued jogging trousers, socks, t-shirt and hoodie. Ollie’s wearing a hoodie open over nothing, and no socks.

“Oliver and—” Harmony begins, but Ollie cuts her off.

“No, seriously,” he says, pointing at Steph and Aaron, “what the fuck happened here?”

Raph snaps, “What do you think, Ollie, you fucking ret—” He catches himself before he says the word Steph thinks he was going to, and she spots Jane smiling at him. Forget what happened in here; what the hell happened in those cells to teach Raphael Pittman self-control? He looks back at Ollie and says, “It’s obvious, isn’t it?”

“They’re all over each other,” Ollie says. “Stefan and Aaron. He’s got his hand around him and he’s— he’s— Fuck, man. They’re fucking gay.”

Aaron stiffens. “Ollie,” he says, and hopefully only Steph knows he’s trembling, with fear or anger or both, “you know what? Your mate there stopped himself from saying something off the big list of no-no words, but he’s right: you’re a simp-le-ton.” Is he trying to evoke Declan by stripping the word apart like that, or is he just expressing his contempt? “You did get the same lecture the rest of us did, right? You do know what’s happening here, yes?” Aaron looks over at Maria, positioned by the door with Pippa, tasers held in the ready position. “Maria, you lot did tell him, didn’t you?”

“We did,” she says.

“Then you know what’s going on here.” He sits up a little; Steph loosens her grip so he can. He points from her to himself to others around the room. “She’s a girl. Same as I’m going to be. And him and him and him and you. But where you don’t seem to have advanced beyond the See Spot Run stage of intellectual development, she is smarter than all of us. Smart enough to know that the people with the weapons make the rules. And—” he crosses his arms over his chest, trapping Steph’s hand underneath, “—if she’s a girl and I’m, uh, still a guy, then this can’t be gay, can it? Simple logic.”

“Fuck you, Aaron,” Ollie says.

“Fine. You can follow Declan into the burger machine.”

“Should have made the logic simpler, Aaron,” Raph mutters.

“We don’t want to wash you out, Oliver,” Maria says, taking the cue from Aaron, “but we will if we have to. Either way, you can’t fight us forever.”

“I can,” Ollie says.

“No you fucking can’t!” someone shouts, and Steph almost hiccups from surprise, from the breath she’d been holding coming out in one sharp burst. She twists, looking for the speaker, and there’s Will, having thrown his book to the ground and stood up. He’s not quite the presence he used to be, but he’s still tall and he’s still loud. “You can’t, Ollie. You can’t fight them. That’s just how it is. I know, I know, you’re a big man—” he says it with a sneer in his voice, the same sneer he used to reserve for flat-Earthers and creationists and people who didn’t go Fuck yeah, Science! when he lectured them about self-driving cars, “—and you don’t think a few chemicals can change you, but they will. They’re changing you right now! You do see that, I hope? You have looked down, right? They’re in control, Oliver, and they have all the weapons and all the keys and all the drugs. You can’t win, and if you keep trying to be the hardarse you’re so proud of being, they’ll just wash you out. They’ll send you away just like Declan, to be killed or taken somewhere even worse. Remember how Steph used to try and tell us what I’m telling you now? About the tasers and the locks and the sheer weight of numbers stacked against us? Remember how I thought that was bullshit, that there was something we could do about it? Remember how that got all three of us locked up even tighter? I know you’re an idiot, Ollie, but you don’t have to be a fool.”

“Fuck you, too.”

Will turns away, massages his ribcage for a moment. Steph watches as he takes a few controlled breaths. “Eloquent,” he says. “Tab, I’m going to my room.”

Tabby nods. “Sure. I’ll bring you some lunch later.”

“I would appreciate that.”

“You fucking pussy!” Ollie shouts. Will ignores him.

One of the other sponsors, one Steph doesn’t really know because she normally sponsors someone in another year — her name’s Donna or something — holds the door open for Will. Before he leaves, he turns around, says formally, “I apologise for losing my temper,” and exchanges another nod with Tabby.

That’ll be the new Will, then. Removing himself rather than continuing to escalate. An improvement. Steph pictures him holding himself straight until he’s safely out of sight and then staggering under the weight of released tension. She hopes he’ll use some of the white noise and ASMR videos she showed him.

Adam watches him go — and Steph wonders if he and Will are ever going to talk to each other again — then turns back into Edy’s arms, unwilling to be a part of anything going on this morning.

“Will’s right,” Raph says.

Ollie gives Raph the finger, and Steph looks at Raph properly for the first time. Ollie’s had her attention since he came in, and for good reason: even if he’s enough under Harmony’s control to back down when she tells him to, he’s still belligerent and stubborn and thus worth keeping an eye on. Ollie’s far slimmer than he used to be, and has the barest hint of chest development, less even than she and Aaron have. He’s also clearly been pulling at his hair as part of his efforts to frustrate Harmony, and sore, balding spots are dotted across his head. She remembers Aaron saying on her first day that Ollie had already been tased sixteen times.

But Raph’s different. Physically, he’s similar, just without the bruises and the torn-out hair, but where Ollie is on edge, stiffly grabbing at the seat of his stool and constantly checking on the sponsors who are watching him — Steph suspects he’ll be made to use the shackles in his room, the ones Will uses voluntarily — Raph is calm. At some point while Steph wasn’t watching him he must have dragged his stool over to the supply cupboard, because now he leans against it, ankles tucked under, shoulders casual, every inch the man who isn’t going anywhere and has no interest in entertaining the option.

He also, very clearly, loathes Ollie.

When did that happen? Was it after Will returned to the rest of them, or before? What happens to two habitual followers when they have no-one to follow? Or was it simply that Raph is smart enough, quick enough, pessimistic enough, or whatever, to accept reality, and Ollie isn’t?

The sponsors are staying quiet, like they did when Will was reintroduced. Pippa said it’s to help the ‘boys’ rebuild bonds with each other, and Steph thinks, right now, that it’s probably a good idea. In fact, she can probably help with that. Maybe what Raph needs, after all that time with Ollie and their respective sponsors, is for someone to talk to him like an equal.

“Raph,” she says, and the man looks at her, surprised. Aaron turns a little, not enough to look at her but enough to register his concern. She squeezes him, hoping to be reassuring, and he subsides. “How are you doing?”

He laughs drily. “How do you think I’m doing, Stefan? I’ve been chemically castrated. I might not be headbutting the wall like Ollie, or decorating little murderer dolls with the hair I ripped out of my head, but just because I’m not fighting back any more doesn’t mean I’m happy about it.”

“Pussy,” Ollie mutters, giving his favourite word another outing.

“Psycho,” Raph counters.

“Girl.”

“Not yet, shithead.”

“Will you two cut it the fuck out?” Aaron says, backing up farther into Steph’s arms. “You’re a worse double act than Adam and Will used to be! Yeah, we get it, Raph’s the realist and Ollie’s the dickhead and you hate each other but guess what? No-one else cares. No-one.” He’s shaking, but he keeps talking. “You know what it’s been like down here since the broken toys got put away? Actually kind of bearable! We’ve been able to have conversations and eat lunch and do big, girthy shits without Will barging in and well actually-ing us or one of you calling us gay for speaking in complete sentences! We got the briefest glimpse of a future that doesn’t completely fucking suck! And now you’re back, insulting each other and looking ready to dent yourself on the furniture again. Thank fucking God, you know?”

Raph says, “Look, dude—”

At the same time, Ollie says, “You fucking—”

“Shut up!” Aaron shouts, and he’s pressed so tight against Steph that his shoulder hurts her chest. “Shut up! Fucking hell! Me stopping talking was not a cue for you to start your whole thing up again! Blah blah fucking blah! Shit!”

He has nothing else to say. She can almost feel him searching, looking within himself for something else to yell, because he knows that if he yields the floor to them they’ll keep going and never stop, but he finds nothing. Steph holds him, presses her chin against his head, shushes him, whispers to him; hopefully quietly enough that the others won’t hear, but if they do, fuck them. Aaron’s life has been calm for the first time in years, and he’s had the time to explore a side of himself he’s spent his whole life being forced to neglect, but now Raph and Ollie are back and so’s the tedious, pointless, never-ending masculine chest-beating. Steph’s tired of it but for Aaron it’s worse; for Aaron’s it’s destructive.

He’s stiffened his limbs as much as he can, controlling his body’s response to stress so it doesn’t show, but the position he’s in right now is unstable; he’ll need to sit up to be comfortable. So she helps him, climbing out of the sofa cushion she’s been pressed into and manoeuvring him so he’s sitting cross-legged in the dent she left, and then she walks around to the other end of the couch, faces Raph and Ollie, and half-sits on the armrest, extending her legs out in front for balance and crossing them at the ankles.

Just as she hoped, she draws their attention. She’s no longer mostly hidden by Aaron’s body, so they can see how she’s dressed, and she’s much closer now, so they can see what she’s put on her face. Ollie swears and Raph’s eyes widen and she smiles for both of them.

She’s wearing a cami and capris, sports socks so she doesn’t have to walk around barefoot on the concrete floor, and one of the bracelets Pippa made for her, and while it’s been just about long enough since her last electrolysis session that she can safely wear makeup again, she’s still far from an expert, so she’s just put on some tinted moisturiser, to cover the redness, and a spot of eyeliner, to practise. She knows exactly what she’ll look like in Raph and Ollie’s eyes, and while she is unambiguously a woman in transition she is also very clearly someone who is looking and dressing the way she pleases. Emphasis, she adds to herself as she looks at Raph, on the motherfucking pronoun.

It had been her first decision when she heard they were coming back, even before considering how visible to make her relationship with Aaron: screw the boy costume.

“Jesus, Stefan,” Raph says.

“Stephanie,” she says flatly. She refuses to be nervous for this guy!

“Je-sus,” Raph says again.

“Also not my name.”

“Oh, shit,” Ollie says, “you are a fucking f—”

She interrupts him quietly but firmly: “Ollie, if you don’t get yourself under control I’ll come over there and belt you like I did Declan. I don’t care about sponsors, I don’t care about tasers, I don’t care about any of that, I will hit you.”

“Jesus Christ,” Raph says.

“Thanks, Raphael,” she says.

“Yeah,” he says. “Sure.” He sounds distracted.

“Oh, fuck you, Stefan,” Ollie says. “Just because you sucker punched Dec once doesn’t make me scared of you. You hit like a girl, Stefan. And what’s with your voice?”

Steph ignores that last part. “I don’t want you to be scared of me, Ollie, for fuck’s sake; I just want you to slow down. To think. Everyone keeps telling you what’s happening here; everyone! And you know there’s no way out. No way except the ways they provide.” She stands up from the armrest and steps closer, and Ollie leans back a little on his stool. He’s really not scared of her, though; Steph would recognise anywhere the cis disgust reaction she’s feared ever since she was old enough to know who she was. She couldn’t bring herself to transition for the fear of it, isolated herself because of it, and now she has to face it here. In the place where she finally became herself. Anger gutters her voice. “Don’t be stupid, Ollie. You can’t fight this. You’re going to be a woman or you’re going to wash out. That’s the equation here. There’s no secret third option.”

“He’s gonna be burger meat,” Aaron sings, and Steph glances back at him; he’s looking flushed, but he’s still sitting up and he’s holding himself more casually now. He’s recovering. Good.

On the other couch, Edy and Adam are standing up and collecting their things.

“No,” Ollie says. “No. No. No. It’s stupid. I don’t care how much you love it, I’m not going to let them make me into a poof.”

“It’s not about him, idiot,” Raph says, with the air of someone who’s had this conversation a hundred times before.

“Her,” Aaron corrects him, as Edy and Adam quietly leave through the exit to the bathroom. Steph wonders why that door for a moment, and then realises: it’s getting unpleasant in here, and it’s the nearest exit. Martin, meanwhile, is still sitting with Pamela and looks… quietly amused?

“Whatever,” Raph says. “For fuck’s sake, Ollie, you know I don’t want this — no-one wants this — but what do you want to do? Do you want to go back to your cell and keep throwing yourself at the wall? Or do you want to do what he— she— what Stefan says and calm the fuck down?”

“Fuck that,” Ollie says, “and fuck all of you. I’m not going to be a little fairy girl like him.”

“Yes,” Steph says. “Yes, you are.”

“Calm down, you idiot,” Raph says.

“Little fairy girl,” Aaron says. “Little fairy dress. Little fairy wings. Little fairy glitter all over your—”

Ollie stands up, kicking his stool away behind him, and every taser in the room that wasn’t already pointed at him raises. Harmony takes a few steps closer, her own weapon aimed squarely at his torso.

“Oliver—” she starts, but she’s interrupted by a click and a whine: the speakers in the ceiling have switched on.

“Mister Bradley,” a voice says, in such arch and accented tones it takes Steph a moment to place it: Beatrice. But not the Beatrice she’s spoken to; this is Aunt Bea, the act, the matriarch, the creature of power and money and unusual taste in rehabilitation who directs the operations of Dorley Hall. Even at the kitchen table, the first time they met, before Steph accidentally outed herself, she didn’t sound quite like this. Into those four syllables she poured enough scorn, enough precisely accented derision, that the bloody Queen would take notice. “If you do not sit down and behave yourself I will summon the soldiers from the floor above and they will ensure your compliance. You’ve encountered them before, I believe, so unless you are exceptionally unobservant — which is, I grant, not hard to believe of one such as yourself — you will be aware that they carry… heavier weaponry than mere tasers, and they are authorised to use them.”

“Who are you?” Ollie shouts.

“Dear me, Mister Bradley, there’s no need to yell. I’m the one who instructed that you be placed under the care of this institution. I’m the one who formulated your treatment plan. I’m the one who can order your removal, Mister Bradley, if you do not comply. Now, the girls, they’re compassionate; they see potential in you. I, bluntly, do not share their optimism. I had Declan removed and right now the only thing preventing me from having you removed is my trust in your sponsor. So I suggest, Mister Bradley, that you pay her a little more attention and a little more respect, lest you wind up back in that cell, alone, awaiting my presence.” Her voice intensifies and softens at the same time, as if she’s moved closer to the microphone and dropped to a near-whisper. “Because if you ever give me cause to come down here to see you, Oliver, I’ll make you wish you hadn’t.” Finally, in a more ordinary tone, much more reminiscent of the Beatrice Steph’s met, she says, “Girls, take him to his room and cuff him. Give him some time to think.”

The circuit clicks off.

A moment of silence passes, and then the sponsors move into action, with Harmony moving around to Ollie’s other side, remaining at arm’s reach and with her taser ready. Pippa and Maria move closer, but it’s Maria who first sees Ollie going for Jane’s weapon and thus it’s Maria who fires her taser.

There’s a thump as he hits the ground, gurgling.

The circuit clicks back on and Bea, sounding tired, says, “Fine. Put him back in the cell. Give him a week to think about it.” As various sponsors surround Ollie, lift him and drag him from the room, Aunt Bea says, “Good morning, Raphael. I do hope you won’t be as much of a bother as your friend.”

“He’s not my friend,” Raph says.

“Then there’s hope for you, yet.”

 

* * *

 

The woman’s back. The blonde, pretty one. Seems to be in her early forties, calls herself Valerie. No; Valérie. Fucking French. Trevor should have paid more attention in school, then he might have fewer issues pronouncing what she insisted to him is a perfectly common name.

She also insisted to him that she’s fifty-three, which is frankly unbelievable and which has given him cause to suspect her of lying, of being part of the old woman’s games. She claimed to be like him, to have been kidnapped and altered over thirty years ago, but is she another Jake, another false friend?

“Where the hell have you been?” he demands, as she closes the front door and shivers against the cold. He’s being rude, yes, but even if her claim to be a fellow prisoner is true, she’s the one walking around free and he’s the one chained by his ankle to the wall. Hard to put your best foot forward when you can’t move it more than a few metres.

“Do you think I can come and go as I please?” she snaps, shaking out her hair. She’s wearing light makeup, but she doesn’t need any more than that to look stunning; if she is like him, she either already looked like a girl before Dorothy got to her, or the surgeons Silver River has access to really are as good as the old woman claims. “I am here against my will, same as you. My movements are constrained and I must be careful.”

“It’s been a week.”

“Don’t be such an old woman about it.” Valérie flicks the corner of the curtain aside with practised fingers and peers through the sliver of clear glass she’s created. “That’s my job.” Satisfied with what she sees — or doesn’t see — she folds the curtain back into place and turns to face him. “Apologies; the joke was there, I picked it up.”

“Who are you?”

He doesn’t know if it’s a wise question to ask, but it’s not as if he has any cards left to play; either he’s at this woman’s mercy or he’s at Jake and Dorothy’s, and this woman at least has yet to press herself upon him or alter him surgically.

“I am Valérie,” she says. “Va-lé-rie. I could write it down for you?”

“I know that,” he says. “I mean— Look. You said you’re like me. I find it hard to believe.”

“Flattery will get you nowhere, Trevor Darling,” Valérie says severely.

“You said you’re fifty-three!”

Her brows pucker minutely. “I am.”

“Bullshit. I guessed forties and I was considering going lower.”

“I have not been outside for more than a cumulative day in thirty years. And I moisturise. And I’m not a muck-eating English. It all adds up. Trevor, I thought you might perhaps be smarter than this, but since you willingly signed up with a private military company I’ll grant that there is a greater than even chance that I was wrong. Everything I told you last week — everything — was from my experiences; my life, or the lives of people I loved. Who am I?” She points a finger at him. “I’m what you get when a teenage boy has his parents killed in front of him and is slowly and surgically and hormonally turned into a girl against his will. I’m what you get when that boy lives with it long enough to learn how to live with it, to become the girl they made of him.” With a deep breath she concludes, “I’m what you get when that girl becomes a woman, becomes old, and yet remains in the service of the bastards who abused her. My age isn’t a lie, Trevor, and neither is anything else, and I’m tired. I want to leave this place, and with you and the evil bitch Frances I might actually have a chance.”

“I’m—”

“Or I might die trying,” she adds, almost casual. “That is a distinct possibility. But, on balance, I prefer to live. There’s someone I want to see.”

“Sorry,” he says. He doesn’t know if he believes her or not, but there’s something to her. Something he hasn’t seen in Jake or the old woman. He thinks of soldiers in the First World War, climbing up out of their trenches to run into gunfire, unaware of whether or not they were running to their deaths; Valérie has the feel of a woman who has survived for much, much longer than she ever expected to.

“Do not apologise. Apologies get us nothing. What is important is what we do.” She gestures at the box of makeup supplies on the table. “Have you been practising your makeup?”

“Fuck no.”

She kicks the leg of the table hard enough to make him jump. “Trevor! What did I say last time?”

“I, um, don’t remember.”

“It is fine for you to look like a mess once, twice, even three times. But Dorothy expects compliance. She likes compliance. She likes you to obviously hate yourself for going along with it, but if you do not eventually accede to her ‘requests’ she will choose other methods. In my day, that meant cutting at my skin, sleep deprivation and starvation, and putting aside the fact that none of these are things you want to experience — especially if you are going to be in fighting shape for our escape — the mad old pervert has had three decades in which to become more creative. Do you think you would enjoy discovering what a sadist with no oversight and no interest in your wellbeing will do to you when she starts to find you boring?” She holds out a hand, and he frowns at it, wondering why she wants to shake, and then she turns it palm-up and beckons him with her fingers. “Stand,” she says, “and show me your wardrobe and I’ll dress you up like someone who gives a shit, and then we can paint your face so you look like you’ve been practising your makeup.”

Her voice cracks a few times as she talks him through the clothes and the makeup she chooses for him. She’s putting everything on her hope of getting out of here, and using him to do it, and he could tell her it’ll never happen, that in his experience the sort of people who chain you to a wall don’t tend to give you opportunities to run off, nor leave holes in their surveillance to exploit, but she’s been a prisoner for a long time, so why disappoint her? Why not play along? It’s not as if things can get much worse for either of them.

 

* * *

 

“Lads, it’s your lucky day.”

Aaron leans his head back to look at Maria, and for a moment they face each other, each one upside down. Then she pokes him gently on the nose and stands up from where she’s been leaning on the back of the couch.

“Is it?” he asks, twisting around on the couch until he can see her again. “Does that mean we get to leave?”

She swats idly at the air near his head. “No. Don’t be a shit.”

He sticks his tongue out at her. He’s feeling light. Free. A little giddy. Raph and Ollie came back and Ollie was a complete dick and got sent back to his cell like a disobedient child and Raph was only kind of a dick and thus was allowed to stay and the rest of them therefore get to continue on as they were before, their personal and particular journeys — or whatever Martin calls his absolutely fucking baffling personality reset — uninterrupted. The last thing he needed today of all days was a huge injection of stress and it looks like they’ve all gotten away with it.

Because today he’s going upstairs.

Maria said yes.

“Sorry,” he says, unapologetic and unable to keep the smile from consuming his face.

Steph aims a gentle kick at his exposed backside; Maria gives her a thumbs up. “Tomorrow,” Maria says, taking a few steps back to address the whole room, “you get Christmas dinner with all the trimmings, but today everyone upstairs is busy, so you get a choice of frozen meals. We have chili, lasagne and veggie lasagne, and a sort of sausage and Yorkshire thing. And we have stew. Because we always have stew. Oh, and don’t let the ‘frozen’ fool you; these aren’t supermarket meals. Someone made them. With love. And then we mass-froze them and put them in the big freezer out back. Hands up for chili?”

Raph says, “Beef chili?”

“Yes.”

“Real beef? None of that fake shit?”

“Real beef, Raphael.”

“Fuck yes. I’ll have some chili, then.”

Martin selects the vegetarian lasagne, and Steph and Aaron ask for stew. They aren’t getting it: this is the afternoon of the big Christmas Eve dinner, stretching into the Christmas Eve party, and while the other boys are eating in their rooms, Maria will be helping Aaron get dressed; Steph’s meeting Pippa in her room up on the first floor.

“Still can’t believe you, man,” Raph says, when Maria and Pippa have both left and the other sponsors have returned to their quiet conversation at one of the tables.

“Believe who about what?” Martin asks.

“Shit,” Raph says, “I was talking about Stefan, but why are you so fucking cheerful all of a sudden?”

Martin’s lying on a couple of bean bags in front of the TV, and he’s spent most of the conversation idly paging through a paperback, but for this he sits up a bit, looks directly at Raph.

“What do you care?” he says. “I mean that genuinely, by the way; why do you care? Even before you attacked Maria we barely spoke, and you made it quite clear I was beneath your contempt. Actually, for someone who always claimed to hate Aaron, you picked up on his nickname for me pretty quickly.”

“That’s because it’s funny,” Aaron says, “and objectively true.” Steph pokes him.

“I don’t care,” Raph says. “I’m just— Okay, so I’ve been doing some thinking.”

“Did it hurt?” Aaron asks. Steph pokes him again.

“You know what? Fuck you, it did. Contemplating everything these psychos are doing to us hurt quite a fucking lot.”

“Poor baby.”

“Shut up. Stefan, control your boyfriend.”

Steph says, “My name’s not Stefan.”

“Oh, for— Christ! This is what I mean! You’re all insane!” Raph sits forward on the couch, animates his words with his hands. It’s enough for Jane to cough quietly and gesture with her taser. “I’m not going to do anything, Jane, for fuck’s sake.”

“Precedent is not on your side, Raph,” Jane says.

“So why let me out at all?”

“Because, you arse, we’re trying to help you.”

“By taking my balls away?”

“Yes,” Aaron says, before Jane can reply. “By taking your balls away. And I’m all for it; it’s rare that I’ve encountered someone so desperately in need of having his testicles ripped off. Although—” he pretends to think for a moment, “—I would have preferred for it to happen to you in a hilarious accident.”

“Oh, fuck off, Aaron.”

Aaron shows him a finger.

“So?” Martin says, after giving Raph a few seconds to glare at Aaron. “Why are you talking to me all of a sudden?”

Raph pinches the bridge of his nose, reminding Aaron just for a moment of Maria, when he first came here, when he was a problem for her to solve and not… not whatever he is now. An entity of some sort. Possibly even a friend.

“There’s no way out, Martin,” Raph says. “Ollie might be stupid enough to have another go, but I’m not. Which means… it’s going to happen.” He’s crawling into himself now, tightening his arms around his waist, no longer looking at anyone. “It’s going to happen to me. And I don’t want to be alone for it, okay? And Will hates me and I hate Ollie and Adam hates everyone—”

“Not really,” Steph says quietly.

“—so that leaves you three.”

“I’m touched,” Aaron says.

“Fuck off, Aaron.”

“Aww. We’re friends already.”

Raph unwinds and punches the arm of the couch. “How are you still so fucking— so—?” Unable to complete the thought, he hits the couch again.

“Charming?” Aaron suggests.

“Aggravating?” Martin says.

“Pushing your luck?” Steph whispers in Aaron’s ear.

“So fucking smug,” Raph finishes. “They’re doing to you what they’re doing to me! And you! Martin! Why is everything so funny to you now?”

“You really want to know?” Martin says, tenting his book on the floor.

“Yes! Jesus Christ, yes I do.”

“Okay, then. Serious answer: I’m a murderer, Raph.” The jocularity’s gone from his voice; he sounds more like the Martin Aaron had almost gotten used to: almost affectless; almost dead. “Worst person here by some margin, especially now Declan’s gone. Oliver hit his ex-wife and you fucked over your girlfriend and, I’m willing to bet, hit her, too. Don’t deny it; I don’t care. All of us are bad, but only one of us left a grieving widow behind. And I think maybe it’s worse that I didn’t mean to do it; that I was careless.”

“You were drunk, Martin,” Pamela says, from over at the tables.

“I was drunk,” he agrees. “Drunk in charge of a vehicle. And not for the first time. Even after I killed him, even with help, I couldn’t stop. Too weak to stop drinking. Too careless to not drive. And too well-connected to be put away against my will by normal procedures. Bluntly, I don’t trust myself with my own life.” He looks up, nods at Pamela, and something in his face relaxes. “I trust her,” he continues. “That’s the difference. I put my whole life in her hands. What she does with it is up to her. Who I become is her decision. It’s… freeing.” He laughs weakly. “I won’t pretend I didn’t lose it for a while. I won’t pretend I wasn’t barely hanging on. But the thing is, I wasn’t a recovering alcoholic who’d been forcibly removed from temptation; I was just an alcoholic who can’t get a bloody drink. Maybe when I leave here I’ll actually be in recovery. For real.” He plays with his hands for a little while. “That was the other thing we agreed; if I’m not ready, I don’t leave. I don’t even leave the basement.”

“Seriously?” Steph asks.

“Seriously. Life in her hands, like I said. I can’t be trusted with it.”

“But you trust her,” Raph says, pointing at Pamela, “even though she’s going to make you into a girl?”

Martin shrugs. “Well… yes. But she’s doing more than that.” He leans forward, and even though he’s several metres away, Raph leans away from him. “She’s giving me a complete reset button on my life. No more family, no more of my old friends, no more excuses and no more of the people who made them for me. No more access to the money that let me do, functionally, whatever I wanted. No more Martin.”

“You’re a fucking tranny,” Raph mutters, “like Stefan.”

“If you say that word again,” Jane says loudly, “you’ll go to your room with no real-beef chili. And I’ll tase you a few times. And maybe let Steph kick you.”

“Sorry, Jane,” he says. It sounds rote.

“Apologise to Stephanie, not me.”

“But—”

“No, listen,” Jane says, standing up and walking over to him, her taser held steady, pointed at his chest, “because I thought we worked this out back in the cell. You agreed to be polite and civilised and follow the others’ example. You promised me! So, what do you think? Does calling Steph the t-word sound like polite, civilised behaviour?”

Raph breathes out heavily. “No, Jane.”

“Does it, in fact, sound like the behaviour of a man who’ll go back to the cells if he doesn’t get his shit together?”

“Yes, Jane. Sorry, Stef… Stephanie.”

“It’s fine,” Steph says, and Aaron bites the inside of his cheek for a second because it’s not fine, but what’s anyone going to do, run over there and hit him? That’d put Raph right back in his comfort zone, and honestly… it’s kind of fun watching the fucker squirm.

“You’ve got to be nicer, Raph,” Aaron says, and he feels Steph’s grip on him stiffen; she can tell he’s about to be, as Maria said, a shit. “We’re all girls here, after all.”

“Christ, Aaron,” Raph says. “You’re just as bad as the others.”

“Really?” Aaron asks brightly. “You really think so? You think the sponsors just happened to pick up a bunch of unruly lads who all secretly wanted to be girls and you and Ollie are the only real men out of the lot of us? Or are we all just… adapting? Don’t you keep saying you’re not stupid?”

“How can you adapt to this? Accepting you can’t stop it, that I understand. But you’re acting like it’s all fine.”

“Maybe it is,” Martin says. “Maybe they’re right.”

“No,” Raph says. “Fuck no. They’re on some SJW men-are-evil shit. They’d kidnap a thousand men if they could.”

“Yeah, probably,” Pamela whispers, giggling.

Raph leans back again, inclines his head towards the ceiling, and sighs heavily. “Fucking kill me,” he says. “Do all of you really think it’s justified that they’re doing this to us? Just because we’re men?”

“What kind of a question is that?” Aaron says. “Especially coming from you. This isn’t because we were men, Raph; it’s because we were bad men.”

“Nah,” he says, still staring upwards. He sounds exhausted. “They think all men are evil.”

“Not true,” Jane says, though she sounds a little uncertain.

“I’m sure the sponsors would agree that there are some good men,” Aaron says. “Like, uh, Keanu Reeves! He’s a good man. Gives all his money to, like, the key grips, whatever they are. A band, I think. And that guy? From Bournemouth? From earlier this year? He saved those dogs from being crushed up, or something.”

“Crushed up?” Jane says, frowning. “Wait— Bournemouth? Oh, goodness, Aaron; what is it you think a puppy mill does?”

“Not important,” Aaron says, making a mental note to ask someone. “The point is, men can be good. But us, Raph, you and I, we can’t. Yeah, there’s a way to navigate all the male training that got shoved our way and come out the other side as someone who isn’t a complete bastard, obviously because loads of— many— some men manage it just fine. We didn’t. We fucked it, Raph. Failing grade. We’re like Martin: addicts. Well, I’ve got my One Week Not A Man chip and, you know, I’m still conflicted about it, but what’s different about me now is I understand that there are guys out there who can just… drink in moderation. But I can’t and neither can you. So, cold turkey, dude.”

“Fuck off, Aaron.”

“Raph, you’re failing the Turing Test, here.”

“Boys!” someone calls, and when all heads turn it’s Maria, standing in the doorway to the corridor with Pippa. There’s a gym bag slung over one shoulder, and Aaron finds it difficult to look away from it.

“Dinner time,” Pippa says, and raises a significant eyebrow at Steph.

Around them, everyone starts to get up, but before anyone can do more, Aaron grabs at Steph, pulls her back down to him and kisses her. It’s not a good kiss — it’s sloppy and clumsy, both from the angle and from Steph’s complete unpreparedness — but Aaron doesn’t especially care. It still feels special to kiss her.

“Gross,” Raph says. “Did you kiss your boyfriend just to annoy me?”

Aaron releases Steph, allows himself to be helped up, and kisses her again, on the cheek.

“One,” he says, “she’s my girlfriend; two, yes.”

 

* * *

 

This is beyond fucked up.

The first time Trevor wore a dress, he was fifteen. The boys at school decided, apropos of nothing he’d actually said or done, that he was gay, and therefore he should wear a dress. Satisfied with their flawless logic, they cornered him between classes, dragged him behind the community centre and stripped him. He fought back — he got a couple of them good — but when eventually he was alone again he’d been left with bruises, an awful flower-print dress that barely covered his crotch and which they must have stolen from the drama department, and a choice: go to his afternoon classes naked, or wear the damn thing.

The second time he wore a dress was for Dorothy. Jake made him put it on after he shaved him, and he wore it with poorly applied makeup and an attitude to match, an attitude he expected her to hate but which seemed, absurdly, to excite her. He caught glimpses of himself in the mirror that evening, and he saw roughly what he expected to see: a man, surgically altered, shoved into a dress. He’d looked comical.

The third time’s today, after Valérie chose his outfit and sat him down and painted him. At the time he wondered if a straight man would have found the experience perversely enjoyable, because as much as she’s more than twice his age she’s still an extraordinarily attractive woman, and even under such circumstances he’d found being taken care of almost relaxing. It had certainly been better to be touched with care than to suffer Jake’s hands.

But when she escorts him to one of the bungalow’s many mirrors, when she shows him her handiwork, when he sees the person he’s supposed to grow to become if Valérie’s unlikely hope of escape is ever to come to fruition, he wants to scream at her until his lungs weep blood. He wants to throw up until his stomach inverts. He wants to tear at his skin and rip himself to shreds and he settles for punching the glass until it shatters.

He knew Dorothy had instructed the doctors to alter his face, but under stubble and then under his inexpert makeup the changes hadn’t looked so drastic. Now…

Now he’s gone. Erased. Replaced with someone else, someone with a softer jaw and a smaller nose and brighter eyes and a pair of fucking tits, and the girl in the mirror reflects his horror, his utter, complete and all-consuming need to get out of here.

Except he can’t escape, because the prison is his body.

Glass tinkles as it falls to the floor around him, and Valérie takes a delicate step back. She closes her hands around his shoulders, gently but firmly, and he wonders why she’s shaking until he understands, no, she’s fucking not.

“Trevor,” she whispers.

“That was me,” he says.

“I’m afraid so.”

“How did you survive this?”

“There is a sense,” she says, “in which I did not.”

He wants to turn around but her grip hardens and he’d have to push her down to move and he can’t — yet — bring himself to be violent towards her. “That doesn’t help, Valérie. I just— I can’t— There aren’t words for what this is like.”

“Yes. There are.” She releases him, gives him the space to stagger on his awful three-inch heels over to the couch. “Dorothy wants you to know,” Valérie says, “that this is your life now. She wants you to understand it. And I think, now, you do.”

His head finds his hands and it’s almost too much effort to hold it up. He wants to collapse, to cease to exist. He’s shaking still, he knows it, and when he gathers enough strength to look up at her again she’s frowning at him like she’s angry or disappointed.

“I can’t do this,” he says.

“You can. I did, and I’m sure a big, strong soldier such as yourself is capable of rising to the challenge.”

“No.” He pushes the word out through gritted teeth. “No! She can just— She can kill me.” He starts to stand. “She can kill—!”

Valérie slaps him. Hard enough to hurt. Hard enough that his head snaps around almost as far as it will go. Hard enough to drop him back down into the couch cushions.

He should fight her. He should hit her back. But all he can do is cradle his cheek and watch her as she stands over him.

“There are three ways forward for you, Trevor,” she says. “One: you die here like so many of my sisters. Two: they ship you off to whatever pervert decided he liked the look of you, and you either die at his hand or you wish you had. Three: you escape. And—” she kneels in front of him, too close, like she wants him to push back at her, “—if you want to escape you need to understand everything. You need to know how bad it can get. And you need to get used to seeing that in the mirror. To looking down and seeing yourself in pretty dresses and your feet in nice shoes. She wants you upset and off-balance and angry and riddled with self-disgust, Trevor; it’s what makes her excited. And it’s what makes you a good… product. But she doesn’t want you catatonic, or so miserable you can’t paint your own face.”

“You want me to participate in this… fucking charade?” he asks, so hoarse his voice is almost silent. “I can barely think straight.”

“Perfect,” Val says, standing up. “Use it. And you should clean up the glass. It shows willing.” She can see his face start to crease up again and she rolls her eyes. “Look, I am sorry this is hard for you. It won’t be forever, not if you do it right.”

“I’m a fucking man, Valérie!”

“Yes? Take me to a mirror you didn’t ruin, and show me, then. Point to the man you see.”

“What? I can’t—”

“You are a soldier, yes? Paid to go to other countries and kill people?”

“I never did that.”

“But you were fully prepared to. Think of this as… payback. And an opportunity to earn back your life.”

What remains of his energy exits in a bitter and painful exhalation. “You’re not a very nice woman, are you?” he says.

“Trevor,” Valérie says, picking up items of makeup and throwing them in a bag, “no-one has ever suggested I am.”

 

* * *

 

Her mother used to say it was ‘bracingly cold’ on days like these, and took the temperature as an opportunity to stamp around the garden in her wellies and her long skirt and tidy up. There was always something to tidy up in that sweet little garden, when Christine was young, before her first puberty took her mother away from her and delivered her into the uncertain and unreliable affections of her father. Always weeds to pull or flowers to prune or, occasionally, muck from the neighbour’s cat to bag up. And then the real money came in, investments and deals paying the dividends her father always promised they would, and the larger house they moved to had more grounds than her mother could reasonably cover and a gardener who could do it all better than she ever could.

But when she was a kid, when she was nongendered the way children are and accessible to her mother’s affections, she used to sit out on the bench at the back of the garden in the old house, and read aloud from her book for her mother to hear, and blow hot breath into the cold air for her mother to run up and catch, laughing.

She lets her breath mist in front of her again, remembering things forgotten; people forgotten.

The Royal College of Saint Almsworth is laid out below her, a scattering of mismatched buildings and argumentative architecture, almost empty and with the remains of the morning frost still clinging. Christine sits on the bench at the top of the hill with her knees under her chin, and misses things.

The second years are going to be at the dinner this afternoon, and the party after. It’ll be nice to see them all again, even though they inspire the strangest nostalgia in her; fond memories of the simplicity of her early years at Dorley Hall, when all that was required of her was to survive, to change, to grow, to carve a new selfhood. Now that she’s her, now that she’s Christine, and known and loved by more people than she thinks ever even spoke to her in her old life, she has to choose a path for herself, to decide what she wants to do, and seventy or eighty years have opened up in front of her like a chasm.

She never thought she’d get this far.

Her mum texted her before. Wished her a Merry Christmas. She already asked, earlier in the week, if Christine wanted to visit for the holidays, but she took the negative in good spirits, understanding that the woman she met has another family. Today, Christine replied with a string of emoji and her mother wrote back almost instantly with a photo of herself and her new friend Pat, helping out at the local food bank.

She’s feeling energised again, her mother said, for the first time in a long time. And these young families around Brighton, she had no idea they were struggling so!

Christine’s had the picture up on her phone the whole time she’s been sat on the bench. Her mother, the woman Pat — who seems much younger than her — and a table full of boxes. Her mother’s making a tentative v-sign and Pat’s laughing with her.

Things change, and then they change again. They’re not mother and daughter, but maybe they’re becoming something else. Something healthier for both of them.

Shit. Time’s getting on and Christine’s still got to shower and put her face on. She doesn’t have a role to play this evening except as a dinner guest — a whole host of graduates have been preparing things all day, with the assistance of the second years — but there’s still pressure to look good, to be the perfect young lady in front of Beatrice. At least tomorrow is for nothing but sleeping in, opening presents, and possibly a roast turkey, if someone feels energised enough to operate the AGA. It won’t be Indira, though. A creature of infinite energy, she’s been organising things today, and she’ll be at the meal and the party tonight and then at her family’s tomorrow. She asked Christine to join her, and didn’t completely hide her disappointment when she declined, but she understands. Christine’s first real Christmas with Paige, after all. Next year they’ll have spent the day in London together for sure, and Indira’s also secured from Christine promises for Diwali 2020 and Indira’s mother’s birthday.

Heading down the hill, back into campus, she thinks unavoidably of the start of summer, of life at the Hall when she was still coming into herself, when she could walk the grounds and find almost no-one around; a way to build confidence without having to fight through the termtime crowds. It didn’t last then and it can’t last now — then it was because the university transitioned relatively quickly into a conference centre for the whole month of August; now it’s because the Christmas break is relatively short, no matter how much the whole month of December seems to orientate itself around it, even for those who don’t celebrate — but when it’s just the Dorley live-ins and die-hards, it’s like another world.

She lingers by the empty buildings, touches brick and concrete and stone as she passes, indulges herself; lives, for a little while, in a world that’s just her, and the people she chooses to bring with her.

And then she’s back at the Hall, a bustle of activity, with the doors open to the air to let out the heat and goodness knows how many people cooking in every available kitchen, and it’s also nice to be around her Sisters again, even if it takes her a moment to squeeze past a few she only barely knows, taking a break on the steps, gossiping, laughing, appraising her as she pushes through. She hurries past, takes the stairs up two at a time.

Dira’s waiting for her in her room, and now that Christine’s had her fill of silence she wants to be with her family again.

 

* * *

 

Pippa steers her directly towards the ensuite when they enter her room on the first floor, and Steph wonders for a moment if they really have time for her to shower before dinner before realising that the other woman in the room, the one opening curtains and arranging makeup items on the little table, is Paige, and that therefore this whole operation has likely been planned down to the minute, and asking silly questions would only introduce delays which would cause her to frown at her. And she doesn’t want Paige to frown at her, because she doesn’t need to be any more attracted to Christine’s girlfriend than she already is.

She’s as quick as she can be in the shower, but shaving her legs still takes a while.

She towels herself dry, dons the robe Pippa left for her, and makes it almost two steps out of the ensuite before Paige and Pippa take a shoulder each and guide her to the stool from the dresser, which has been placed in the middle of the room in good light. Paige wordlessly hands her a tube of moisturiser and points at her face, and while Steph sets about applying it, Paige squeezes liberally from another tube and starts rubbing it into Steph’s legs. Pippa, meanwhile, gets to work with the hair dryer.

She can see the dress they want to put her in. It’s laid out in a garment bag on the bed, and it’s black and alarmingly short; she’s pleased, therefore, to see a pair of modesty shorts included in the underwear piled up next to it. She has a momentary worry about the one-inch heels on the calf-length boots sitting at the end of the bed, but dismisses it: she’s in good hands, and if Pippa and Paige think she can walk in what is, ultimately, a pretty low heel, then she almost definitely can.

Aaron’s in good hands, too, with Maria. Steph just hopes he isn’t too uncomfortable.

 

* * *

 

“What do you think? Is it nice?”

Because it’s just the two of them, and because she knows he’s the last person who’d ever harm her, Adam gets the real ceramic plate and the real metal cutlery, and he’s lingering over his vegetarian lasagne.

“It’s lovely,” he says, in the quiet and understated manner that’s been his since perhaps his third week down here, since he dropped the orator’s inflection he was taught at home. Edy doesn’t know if he did so as willingly as he did because he hated speaking that way, or because he witnessed Will’s adoption of the bully pulpit and realised how silly it sounded, but she’s so glad he did. In his first weeks, as much as her compassion for him has always been endless, he was quite difficult to be around. Too much like the men they both escaped.

“The second years cooked it,” she says.

She’s sitting on the floor near the door, her back to the wall and her knees gathered up in front of her, watching him eat and, as ever, evaluating him. She’s looking forward to a time when their interactions aren’t so calculated, but for now, he needs it and he needs her. And this is both a lesson he needs to learn and the right time for him to be confronted with it.

“The second years?” he says, pausing with his fork halfway to his mouth.

She nods. “The girls.”

“The… girls who used to be boys?”

“Just like you will be, yes.”

She told him his intake isn’t actually the first to be regendered and she swore him to secrecy, and with wide eyes and a trembling voice he placed his hand on hers and promised, and she hated herself for lying, or for at least omitting the greatest and most important truth: that she used to be almost exactly like him. It’s useful for him to believe he knows something the others don’t — and he does, for the most part, Aaron and Stephanie excepted, although Ella has said she thinks Martin suspects — because that’s the way he was taught back home. You have secrets, Adam, and they must be protected until the world is ready for them.

It’s also important he doesn’t know about her. Not yet.

His fork remains still.

“They… made this?”

Transsexuals and transgenders and other gender deviants are devils of the secular world who must be resisted most thoroughly, and while Stephanie, bless her, has made inroads with Adam — even claiming to him to have kissed another boy! — there are some mental blocks Edy’s having difficulty breaking. They are unclean, as are the things they have touched.

The fork trembles.

“They didn’t have a choice to be girls, though,” he says. “Did they?”

“That’s the thing,” Edy says, willing him to make the leap, “they did. We gave them the bodies; they became girls by choice.”

“I don’t understand.”

“You are a boy, yes?”

“Yes.”

“Despite the way your body is changing?”

He hesitates. “Yes.”

“Their bodies changed the same way, and when they were in your position there wasn’t one of them who wouldn’t have claimed with vehemence to be a man. But now… Now not one of them wouldn’t call herself a girl.”

Adam closes his eyes. “Girls by choice,” he says to himself. “They are girls by choice. They made this.” He repeats it a few more times; Edy waits for him. Eventually the cooling slice of lasagne makes its way into his mouth, and he opens his eyes as he chews and swallows. “Please,” he says, with less difficulty than Edy expected, “thank them for me.”

“I will,” she says.

“Edy…”

She stands and walks carefully over to him. He takes another bite and she crouches down beside him, a hand on his knee, the other steadying herself on the computer desk. She trusts him, but she’s always ready to bolt, just in case. Some of the things he was taught run deeper than they ever did with her.

“You’re safe, Adam,” she says. “You’re safe here. You’re safe with me. The old lies can’t hurt you. Your father can’t find you.”

“Grace is a precious gift,” he whispers, placing his fork on the side of the plate. “Grace is a precious gift. Grace is a precious gift.”

Edy replies, “And it’s ours, not God’s, to give.”

He returns to his food, and within a minute or so he’s eating with his earlier enthusiasm. Well done, Adam. Edy didn’t get over her conditioned fear of transgender people until she could no longer deny she was one, and that had been a confrontation with herself she’d been lucky to survive. No-one knew how to talk to her about it, but she’s had years to think about how to deal with Adam. He’ll have all the opportunities she didn’t.

She rises, tucks a lock of his hair back behind his ear — he can’t escape her, the way he sometimes tries to when she mothers him, because of the plate in his lap, and she’ll take full advantage — and kisses him on the forehead. “What will you do tonight?”

“I thought I might write in my diary,” he says. “And then play that game. The one where you run a farm.”

Edy smiles, proud and satisfied, and kisses him once more. She closes the bedroom door quietly behind her and hurries up and out of the basement. There’s a dress upstairs waiting for her, and she needs to be in it with her face and hair done double time so she can help Maria get ready, once she’s done with Aaron.

She shakes her head and squashes a laugh. A first year attending the Christmas Eve dinner! Yes, they all expected it of Stephanie, but Aaron…!

What a year it’s been.

 

* * *

 

She had him shower and shave and wash his hair and she told him he’s lucky there aren’t any accessible plug sockets in the basement rooms or he’d be getting the same kind of hair dryer abuse Steph’s undoubtedly suffering upstairs, and he said he wouldn’t have minded that because the longer his hair gets the longer it takes to air dry and really it’d just be quicker and simpler for everyone if they had hair dryers in the basement because then it’d take them all a lot less time to get ready in the mornings and also Ollie would have access to something he could take into the showers and use to electrocute himself.

“He’d need a hell of an extension cord,” Maria said, and pulled off the robe he wore out of the shower and handed him a towel and that’s where he is now, standing in the corner of his room drying every crevice and fold and strangely sensitive swollen bit.

“Is it too late to back out of this?” he asks, eyeing the bag hanging from the cracked-open wardrobe door.

“After I went to all the trouble of finding something in your size?” Maria says. “Yes.”

“Drat.”

“Think of all the fascinating people you’re about to meet.”

“The downside is, they have to meet me.”

Maria taps him on the shoulder and he looks at her. One of many reasons to like Maria: she’s one of the few people he doesn’t have to look up at. “Is this one of those moments of funny self-deprecation or are you actually having a hard time right now?”

“It’s both,” he says. “Always both. Hey, it’ll be okay, won’t it?”

She takes his hand, guides him over to the bed and makes him sit, and so he does, feeling very naked in his wrapped-around towel. Before she joins him she opens the dumbwaiter hatch and retrieves two mugs, steaming with what turns out to be hot chocolate.

“There’s a little Baileys in these,” she says, handing him the blue mug. “It’s good for the nerves. Yes, Aaron, it’ll be okay.”

He nods and sips at his drink. Once, he might have made a dismissive crack about Baileys being a girls’ drink, but such jokes — if ever they contained enough humour to survive such a classification — have lost their lustre, and it’s not as if he isn’t presented daily with a hundred more appropriate opportunities to be crude.

Come to think of it… He remembers his conversation with Yasmin, and holds up his mug to the light, rotating it so he can read the worn and faded caption. The mug is either old or has been designed to look old, and over a silhouette of a 1950s-looking woman applying lipstick are the words, The most revolutionary things a girl can do are find herself, love herself, be herself… The end of the sentence has been crudely blanked out and replaced with, and turn boys into girls in her basement.

“How many of these do you lot even have?” he asks.

“A lot,” Maria says, and shows him hers: My other mug is an admission of guilt. “Sorry. I asked for hot chocolate; I got… this.”

Aaron laughs and almost spills some. “You can’t get the staff these days.”

“Genuinely, you can’t.” She sips from hers and adds, “Seriously, we’re running low on sponsors.”

He drinks deeply. He hasn’t eaten since breakfast, and the alcohol seems to enter his bloodstream directly. He laughs again, quietly and to himself: he’s getting a buzz off hot chocolate. Maria leans against him, shoulder to shoulder.

“What will the other sponsors think of you letting your subject attend an upstairs party?” he asks, when his mug is almost empty. “Will they think you’re losing your edge?”

“Are you kidding? You haven’t even cracked your first three months here and you’re already going on excursions out of the basement. You’ve made incredible progress, Aaron. Better than I predicted. Better than I hoped.”

She feels warm against him. It’s nice. “You make it sound like I did something huge, Maria. I just… stopped making excuses for myself. And as soon as I did that…” He doesn’t want to vocalise it. It doesn’t matter. Not important. In the past.

“I’ve had girls coming into the second year who haven’t made the intellectual and emotional leaps you’ve made. Yes,” she adds, because he stiffened a little, “girls. That’ll be you. Like you said—”

“It’s a fun thing to taunt Raph with,” he says. “Still an intimidating concept to contemplate, you know?”

“Trust me,” Maria says, “I know.”

“Yeah. Yeah, of course you do.”

“Aaron. Seriously. I’m proud of you. The other sponsors are going to be so jealous of me tonight.”

The intercom clicks and a voice says, “I’m not. Christine’s still better.”

“Go away, Indira,” Maria says, but she’s smiling and rolling her eyes, and when the speakers click off again she nudges Aaron with her shoulder. “You ready to get dressed and meet your admiring public?”

“Fuck it.” He drains his mug, and takes it and Maria’s back to the dumbwaiter. “Let’s do this,” he says, throwing off his towel.

“Okay,” Maria says, “but for the record, in the future I want you to put on underwear before you do that.”

She guides him: this loops around here, these hook into these, and this pulls tight. It’s uncomfortable and it’s unfamiliar and it sits strangely on his hips, but it’s only for one night. He reaches for the wardrobe door, so he can look at himself in the full-length mirror inside, but Maria catches his hand.

“You can admire yourself later,” she says. “Sit down. Carefully, so you don’t wrinkle anything. It’s time to do your hair…”

 

* * *

 

“Stephanie,” Paige says, “do I have your permission to tie your hair in a tight ponytail?” Steph nods, frowning, and realises she’s let her confusion show when Paige continues, “It can be uncomfortable after a while, is all. But I have a plan for your hair, and that plan requires that I pull most of your hair back as far as it will go. It’s just about long enough.”

“Why don’t we try it and see?” Pippa suggests.

Steph nods again and Paige gets to work, gathering up most of her hair and pulling it back to sit high on the back of her head. She’d intended to protest that she can never quite tie a ponytail herself, that she’s still waiting for the length to come in, but Paige pulls it higher than Steph ever thought to, wraps it expertly with a thick hair tie, and steps back to admire her handiwork.

“Good,” Paige says to herself. “Right. Excellent. Be right back, girls.”

“We’re not going anywhere,” Pippa says. When Paige is safely out the door, she leans closer and whispers, “You doing okay there, Steph?”

“Yeah,” Steph says. “Still getting used to this, I suppose.”

Pippa kisses her on the cheek. “I know the feeling. Don’t worry, we’ll be fussing over you for the rest of your natural life; you have plenty of time to grow accustomed to being loved.”

Pippa’s already dressed and made up, and she’s done something with her hair — noticeably longer than it was when they met; she’s been growing out her pixie cut — that makes it sparkle in the light, to match the gems in the neckline of her dress. Always pretty, today she looks stunning, and Steph feels something like the way she did when she first met Abby: diminished, ugly, and irrevocably mannish.

“If I ask to leave—”

“We’ll take you anywhere you want to go,” Pippa says quickly. “Back to the basement, up to the roof, into the woods. Aaron might miss you, though.”

“Yeah.” Shit. She’s committed.

“You can talk to me, Steph.”

Steph exhales, empties herself, breathes out until she feels the strain in her chest, imagines her tension dissipating. She’s being stupid. Everyone here was like her once.

Melissa called her beautiful. Yes, so has practically everyone else around here, but Melissa said it, up on the roof, the day they reunited. She acknowledged that Steph looks in transition — how could she not? — but she made it clear that it doesn’t matter, that Steph is beautiful anyway, and not even the slightest bit male. Only a complete idiot would call you male, she said. Steph memorised it.

The dresser’s off to her left so Paige and Pippa can work on her in the best light, so Steph can’t look at herself head on, but the unfamiliar angle helps. In the old-fashioned oval wooden surround of the dresser Steph’s face is reframed, and she has to agree with Melissa: only an idiot, or a cis person, would think her male tonight.

No cis people at Dorley. Not for long, anyway.

She laughs, and realises Pippa’s been watching her for however long she’s been thinking. “Sorry,” she says. “Just sort of drifted away there for a second.”

“More like a minute. Everything really okay?”

She glances at herself again. “Yes. Yes, I think so.”

 

* * *

 

Something to be proud of: just two months ago, on Aunt Bea’s birthday, Christine had to rely on Paige to make her look the part, to help her feel like a woman who knows what the hell she’s doing and not like a girl who slobs around in shorts and tank tops all the time. And, true, now that the pressure to make an effort has eased somewhat, Christine’s found her way back into the lazier parts of her wardrobe, after much practise she is, finally, capable of going all-out without assistance. Although she did ask for Indira’s help with the eyeliner; she has a steadier hand. The dress is Dira’s, too, and while in some ways it’s more revealing than anything she might have picked for herself it is at least more modest than the butterfly dress Paige put her in that night.

It’s a shade of blue-green Indira called ‘aqua’, and it hangs from Christine’s left shoulder as if the waterfall of silk that wraps her breasts, her hips and her thighs flows wholly from that point. When she moves the folds of the material shimmer and glide across her skin, and when she examines herself in the mirror she feels almost like someone else entirely.

The woman looking back at her is stunning, way too much so to be her, so when Indira walks up behind her and clasps a silver necklace into place, Christine’s almost surprised when she feels the sensation herself. But she shouldn’t be, should she? Isn’t that what Paige has been telling her daily, not just with her words but with her fingers and her tongue, her very presence in her life? That she’s beautiful, that she’s worthy, that she’s, well, Christine, but not Christine in the way she sometimes still thinks of herself, as a survivor, as a geek, as an only occasionally presentable girl surrounded by goddesses; Christine in the worshipful way that Paige says her name, with reverence and love. Deliberately she places herself in her body and in that body too, in the one she can feel and the one she can see. Reminds herself who she is, who she’s become, and the warmth of pride swells again in her belly.

“Christine,” Indira whispers, “you’re lovely, you know that?”

Christine nods. “You’re right,” she says. “I actually am.”

“And modest.”

Whirling, facing Indira and grinning madly at her, Christine says, “Jesus, Dira. If I’m lovely, what are you?”

Indira twirls for her, and her black off-the-shoulder dress spins out at the mid-thigh, exposing her long, toned legs. She doesn’t get them out all that often — doesn’t show off her figure that much at all, preferring practicality for work and loose clothing in the evenings — and Christine might forget how beautiful her sister is if not for moments like these. Indira’s breathtaking, and Christine wonders for a moment what will happen to the country, to the world, if her sporadic auditions bear fruit and she one day appears on TV.

“I clean up nicely, don’t you think?” Indira says, and Christine wants to launch herself at her, but she doesn’t; that might wrinkle their dresses, ruin their makeup. So she allows her smile to broaden yet farther, and takes Dira by the hand, leads her out of her room and down the stairs towards what is likely going to be a moderately mortifying evening full of wine-drunk sponsors, graduates and other associated hangers-on.

At least the food smells incredible.

 

* * *

 

Strange how the dress that looked so fucking scary when it was laid out on the bed feels so ordinary now. But then, Steph’s been dressing up in women’s clothes since—

No. She frowns at the phrasing, borrowed from her mother, from the time a boy from church Steph knew only by name played a girl in a play at the local prep school. Her mother spent weeks afterwards bringing it up at the oddest moments, like when Steph and Petra were playing a princess game on one of the chunky child-safe tablets Petra’s school just started handing out to its kids, as if she could exorcise the memory of the scandalous performance by ensuring that her children would never, ever consider such a thing. Dressing up in women’s clothes: frivolous but forbidden; artifice yet amoral. Don’t cross that line, boy.

Wow. That’s a memory she didn’t expect to find today. She wonders how that kid is doing now.

Steph’s been dressing as she wishes for a while now, gently encouraged by Pippa, Paige, Christine — hell, basically every woman she knows — and while they explicitly haven’t been pushing her, whenever Pippa’s been the one to suggest the outfits she’s always included a showier, more feminine option, more like the clothes Pippa generally chooses for herself, and Steph’s sometimes worn it, for the pleasure that comes from dressing nicely; for the look on Pippa’s face when she does.

So a dress is hardly new territory for her, even if wearing it in front of so many people is; and when she thinks of that her stomach clenches and her head hurts so maybe let’s just concentrate on how we look in the damn thing, okay? Which is, actually, pretty fucking good.

They didn’t want to go too showy or to give her anything difficult to wear, Paige explained, when she removed the dress from its bag and held it up against Steph’s body. No long skirts to manage; no gathered sleeves to accidentally dip in the turkey gravy; no low neckline to make her feel self-conscious or require her to assemble a cleavage out of a chest that, even with the chicken-fillet fillers, is more tell than show. They’ve got her in a simple sleeveless black dress with a high neckline and a skirt to just above her knees, and in deference to her established concern about her pallid legs — not only is she naturally pale but she doesn’t seem to get much sun these days — they’ve got her in a pair of patterned stockings, too. The garter belt is unfamiliar but Paige says it’s better than rolling down your tights every time you have to pee, and the pattern is, well, it’s cute, right?

Steph’s been forced to admit that, yes, it is cute, and another fragment of her lifelong conditioning breaks away.

“You’re posing,” Pippa says.

“So what if I am?” Steph replies with a grin. “I’m pretty!” She’s not sure how powerfully she believes this, but it doesn’t hurt to say it. She’s learned that when she gets self-deprecating, beautiful women frown at her.

“Oh my goodness!” Pippa slaps her forehead with the back of her head, dramatically. “I’ve created a monster!”

“Yes,” Paige says, approaching Steph from her other side, “well done, Pippa. Steph, put your boots on and let’s go.”

 

* * *

 

“How is he?”

Val drops into the ratty old armchair in her room and accepts from Frankie the mug she offers. She doesn’t know what it contains, except that it’s from Frankie, so it’s probably warm and slightly alcoholic, and that’s what’s most important right now. She’s cold to the bone, and not all of it’s from the temperature.

“You remember how we all were?” she says. “When you’d bring us in, castrate us, and throw us out into the common room with a bunch of other injured boys? He’s like that, but worse, Frances, because he’s on his own.” She drinks, and keeps drinking: Irish coffee; just what the doctor ordered. “He’s angry, he’s scared, he’s dysphoric as hell.”

Dysphoric, a word one of the last girls to come to Stenordale Manor taught her, and a useful one, in Trevor’s circumstances. Even in hers, to a point: there’s not a week that goes by that Valérie doesn’t look in the mirror and feel a sorrow she can’t even begin to express for the life that was stolen from her, the man Vincent might have become. She used to imagine sometimes that she could feel the physical sensations the girl described, but she realised today as she watched Trevor recoil from himself in horror that such strength of feeling is utterly beyond her now.

She wouldn’t offer good odds that she’d ever felt it quite so fiercely even when she was young. After so many years she can’t regret losing access to the man’s body she might have had; just his life, his freedom, his family.

His money, maybe. She doesn’t know what she’d spend it on, though.

“I remember,” Frankie says, drinking from her own mug. She’s not supposed to be anywhere in particular right now, having discharged her duty to Dorothy when she prettied up Declan’s face and put him in a frock and packed him off to entertain the old horror show of a woman for a few hours. What Dorothy actually expects of her is that she insult and needle Val while Val works on the boy, but they’ve agreed between the two of them that, if asked, they’ll confirm that, yes, Frances is an evil bitch and, yes, Valérie hates her down to the bone and, yes, Frances enjoys very much the arts of humiliation and degradation; handily, not a word is actually a lie.

“He criticised me for taking a week to come back to him,” Val says. “I am ashamed to say that, in the course of assisting him, I slapped him around the face. Hard.”

Frankie snorts, splashing coffee out of her mug and across her cheek. “Well done, Val!” she says, wiping her face with her sleeve. “I knew you had it in you.”

“I did not enjoy it. I am not like you. I was just… frustrated. I hate myself for it. I can still feel how his cheek felt on my palm.”

“Yeah, well,” Frankie says, “you can learn to live with it. For a while, anyway.”

“Easy for you to say.”

“Yes! Yes, Val, it fucking is! But you don’t have to do it for long. I’m ninety percent certain Dotty’s going to bring me in on the whole Trev situation, and then he’ll be my responsibility. You can go back to painting up our little Barbie Doll Declan so old Dorothy can leer toothlessly at him and all will be right with the world. Until we make our grand escape, of course. However we end up doing that.”

Valérie leans forward in her chair. “You’re looking forward to it, aren’t you?” she says. “Training Trevor. It’ll be like a nice holiday in a simpler world for you, won’t it? Back when Dorley Hall was your playground and we were your toys.”

“Believe it or not, Val, I’m expecting to hate it.”

“Bullshit.”

“Scout’s honour.”

“You hate men! And you love toying with them!”

Frances shrugs. “Yes, kind of.” She swirls the coffee around in her mug, inspects it, and then extracts from the depths of her clothes a flask. She tops up her drink and offers it to Val, who nods and holds out her mug. “Thing is, Val, I had it all wrong. Men are dicks, yes.” She slurps from her mug and winces as the suddenly much more alcoholic coffee burns on its way down. “But what could the men I grew up around do? Slap me around? You know how that went for them. And the Dorley Hall boys, you know they were all just innocent kids. No, Val, the men I hate, they’re the real fucking freaks. They’re Dorothy’s customers. They’re like the dickheads I used to know, but they’ve got money and influence and they can do whatever the fuck they want. And what they want is what the bastard who hit my sister wanted.”

“Explain.”

“They say they want women, Val, but they don’t. They fucking don’t.” She gestures with her mug; Valérie wonders how much she drank, alone in this room. “They want something woman-shaped, but with no opinions, no thoughts, no nothing. It’s best if she doesn’t even need watering or feeding, but if she does, well, that’s fucking chicken feed to these people. Actually,” she adds, frowning and swilling her drink around again, “that’s not quite accurate. Some of them want that, and that’s disgusting, and that’s half of what we were doing: making women-shaped people, people who were completely and totally under control. The titillation of the used-to-be-a-man, thing, for most of them that was just the gravy on the beef, right? But the other men, the ones like Smyth-Farrow, though he was by far not the only piece of shit we delivered to, they want all that and more. They don’t just want a subservient companion, they want something they can abuse without shame, something so far below the category of human that they don’t have to give a shit even when they die. Fuck, Val, they learn to enjoy it.”

“Yes,” Val says, eyes closed, willing herself not to remember. “They do.”

“So that’s what I’ve been thinking about today,” Frankie finishes. “Powerful men and the fucked-up things they want. And I’ve been thinking about you.”

She has to open her eyes at that, and there’s Frankie, sitting forward, tipsily sincere.

“Me?” Val says.

“You. You were made to be a male fantasy. By us. But you never were. I think old Smyth-Farrow would’ve bumped you off if you hadn’t been, uh, who you used to be. If he hadn’t had that extra layer of satisfaction.”

“Probably,” Val admits. He came close, she knows.

“So here’s to you, Val Barbier, for never fulfilling a man’s fantasies, for resisting every bit of hamfisted brainwashing we tried on you, for remaining a cantankerous, opinionated, obnoxious bitch for more than three decades.” She holds out her mug. “Cheers, Val.”

What else is there to do? Val clinks her mug against Frankie’s.

“Cheers.”

 

* * *

 

“This campus is stupid.”

“It’s not.”

“It clearly is.”

“Shy, why would you think the pool would be open on Christmas Eve?”

“I don’t see why everything has to shut down for bloody Christmas.”

“Preaching to the Jewish choir here, Shy, but it’s always like this.”

“Yes, and I always get to gripe about it. I just thought—”

“—Shy—”

“—because the campus shop is open—”

“—Shy—”

“—that maybe the other facilities would be, too.”

“Shy!”

“I want a dip, Rach. Is that such a crime?”

“Yes, now shut up, because I need to ask you something.”

“…Go on.”

“Where are all these women going?”

They’ve been sitting below Café One in the central quad — no longer actually central, not since the Anthill was built, and even less so now — waiting for Melissa to come back, and for the last half-hour or so a steady stream of people have been walking by, from the car park by the main road, through the quad, and down towards the path by the Student Union Bar. Most of them are dressed up, many of them are lugging carrier bags with distinctive box-shaped, present-like cargo inside, and all of them have been animated and happy.

Shahida knows exactly where they’re all going.

“Not sure,” she says. “Why?”

“We’ve been bumming around campus all day,” Rachel says, swivelling to face Shahida and crossing her legs under herself on the bench, “and there’s been practically no-one around. Now, suddenly, hot women in party dresses are everywhere.”

“It’s one or two every couple of minutes, Rach. I wouldn’t call that ‘everywhere’.”

“There’s a party,” Rachel says. “Somewhere. A Christmas party.”

Shahida shrugs. “Probably?”

Rachel narrows her eyes. “Shy?” she says. “It’s at Dorley Hall, isn’t it?” Shahida doesn’t answer, and Rachel slaps the arm of the bench in triumph. “I knew it! Wanna crash?” Shahida still doesn’t answer. “Shit, Shy; you’re going, aren’t you? You were invited, weren’t you? That’s why you didn’t want to come back to my parents’ for Snakes and Ladders and latkes tonight!”

“Yes,” Shahida says, “I was invited, but please, Rach, keep it down?”

“Why? Oh, yeah, the whole secrecy thing.” She cranes her neck, spots a couple more women walking up behind her. “Chag Sameach,” she says, with the kind of genuine sincerity probably only Shahida can see right through.

“Pardon me?” one of the women says.

Her friend nudges her and says to Rachel, “Happy holidays.”

“Merry Christmas,” Shahida says, smiling at them both. “I like your hat.”

The taller woman of the two — and she is really quite tall — pats her woolly hat with her free hand. It’s red, and there are Christmas trees on it. “Oh, um, thank you,” she says.

When they’re out of earshot, Rachel says, “Traitor!”

“What?”

“Honestly, you sod off to America for years and you come back all… cosmopolitan.”

Shahida snorts. “Rach, who are you channelling right now?”

“My uncle. You haven’t met him; be glad.”

“I am. Profoundly.”

“So… you get invited to the Dorley Christmas Eve party and I don’t?”

“It’s more of a meal.”

“Even so.”

“Rach, I…” There’s no way she can think of to say, ‘I know the secret,’ without implying that there is a greater secret to know than the one Rachel reasoned herself into — that Dorley Hall is a refuge for transitioned and transitioning women escaping abusive families that also just happens to function as a university dormitory — so Shahida doesn’t, hoping Rachel will infer a meaning that supports the story she understands.

“Right,” Rachel says, frowning.

“Sorry.”

“It’s okay! It’s fine. Like I said, I’m at my parents’, anyway. And I’m round at Belinda’s tomorrow, for turkey.”

“I thought you hated Christmas.”

Rachel pokes Shahida. “And my wife’s family doesn’t,” she says.

The next two people to walk past them are a woman and a man, interrupting the unbroken stream of women, but before Rachel or Shahida can comment on it, the woman turns back and rushes towards them, pulling down her hood and unzipping the front of her coat and revealing herself to be Tabitha Forbes.

“Shy!” she says, reaching out for a hug and obliging Shahida to stand and accept one. “Hi!”

“Hi, Tab,” Shahida says, hugging at least four layers of clothing that contain, somewhere inside, a Tabby.

“Happy hols,” Tabby says, stepping back. “Hi, Rachel. Ladies, I’d like you to meet Levi.”

The man steps forward, pulling down his own hood and smiling for both of them. “Hi,” he says. “You’re friends of Tabitha’s?”

“Yes,” Shahida says.

“Friend of a friend,” Rachel says, pointing first at Shahida and then at Tabitha. Shahida accidentally-on-purpose kicks her in the ankle as she sits back on the bench. Rachel winces, rolls her eyes at Shahida, and asks, “You’re going to the party at Dorley Hall?”

“It’s more of a meal,” Shahida says.

“I am,” Tabby says. “He’s just dropping me off.”

“I’m a glorified taxi driver,” Levi says.

“Are you coming?” Tabby asks Rachel.

“No,” Shahida and Rachel say simultaneously. “She doesn’t celebrate,” Shahida continues.

“Nor does she,” Rachel says sweetly.

“I like turkey.”

“Me too,” Levi says, “and that means I need to get going, Tab, or I won’t make it back home before midnight and my ma’ll punish me with nut cutlet.”

“Okay,” Tabitha says, turning away from Shahida and Rachel to embrace him. She whispers something Shahida doesn’t hear, and then they kiss — Tabby having to bend her knees a little — and he’s walking briskly back towards the car park. “Safe journey!” she calls after him; he acknowledges her with a wave. “He’s going home to Edinburgh tonight,” she says, after he’s disappeared around the corner. “It’s a long drive. I hope he’ll be okay.” She smiles. “Isn’t he gorgeous, though?”

“Probably, yes,” Shahida says.

“Sorry,” Rachel says. “We’re lesbians. We can’t tell.”

“Right,” Tabitha says. “So, why’re you hanging around out here in the cold? Holiday blues?”

“We’re waiting for Em,” Shahida says. “For Melissa, I mean. She got a call from the car rental place reminding her to drop the car off. She didn’t want to pay another extended fee, so.” She shrugs. “She’s probably in an Uber back here now.”

“We would have gone with her,” Rachel says, “only someone wanted to go swimming.”

“Swimming?” Tabitha frowns. “On Christmas Eve? Is it even open?”

Rachel whacks Shahida’s thigh with the back of her hand. “See?”

“Rachel Gray, you leave me alone.”

“Rachel Gray-Wallace,” Rachel corrects her.

“You two are adorable,” Tabby says, and to Shahida’s amusement, Rachel scowls at her. “Ah,” Tabby adds, pointing towards the car park, “your girl’s here.”

Your girl. If only.

Melissa waves and breaks into a light jog, and it’s an opportunity to watch her without feeling self-conscious. She’s dressed for the December cold in a beige coat, a tartan skirt, leggings and knee boots, with a woolly hat and earmuffs to finish it off. Shahida once again thinks that Melissa is quite the most beautiful woman she could ever hope to meet.

But then, she’s realised, she’s always thought that. Even when Melissa was Mark, Shahida thought that.

Melissa collides with Shahida as she stands up to greet her. They manage to turn it into a hug, and disengage quickly, embarrassed to be observed.

They’ve been touching each other a lot lately. Just casually, a hand on a forearm, that kind of thing. Nothing for Shahida to get too excited about. Nothing to make her heart swell or her head light or her knees weak, and yet routinely she is betrayed by her biology. Melissa had to catch her the other day as she almost swooned, and landing heavily in her arms did nothing to alleviate the situation.

Worse, Rachel keeps badgering Shahida about it. Only when Melissa’s not around, thankfully. In Melissa’s presence she limits her commentary to her eyes and, occasionally, to the sorts of lascivious mimes Shahida wishes she could unsee.

“So,” Melissa says, “it’s impossible to get an Uber on Christmas Eve.”

“I could have told you that,” Tabby says.

“I got the bus. It was fine; no drunks.”

Tabby and Rachel both snort; the bus line connecting the university to the city is notorious for being packed with unruly students. But, Shahida supposes, it would be empty now, because the university’s empty. Everyone’s gone back to their families. Except Melissa, and the graduates of Dorley Hall…

The thought makes her grab Melissa’s arm. If only things could have been different. If only she’d been smarter, been less ignorant, had put together the signs which only seem obvious with hindsight. Then Melissa might still have the remnants of a family.

As if she can tell what Shahida’s thinking, Melissa closes a hand over one of hers. She always did know when to comfort her.

“Okay, girls,” Rachel says, “I have to run. Dad’ll be here soon.”

Melissa tears away from Shahida again to hug Rachel, who leans in and whispers something in Melissa’s ear that makes them both laugh. Rachel then pulls back, air-kisses with Melissa and Shahida, waves at Tabby, and heads off towards the car park where her father’s scheduled to pick her up. With luck, he won’t have any strange questions as to why his adult daughter is hanging around the campus of a university neither she nor any of her friends attended.

“Come on,” Tabitha says, nodding in the direction of Dorley Hall, “it’s not getting any warmer.”

The three of them start walking, Shahida and Tabitha bracing Melissa protectively. Habit on Shahida’s part and, since she’s a sponsor, probably on Tabby’s, too.

Shahida nudges Melissa. “What did she say to you?”

“She put on a posh voice and said, ‘All right, then. Keep your secrets.’” She looks sideways at Tabitha. “We, uh, were talking about the Hall again, earlier.” Rachel has more questions for Melissa every time they see each other — and sometimes over Consensus — but has agreed to abide by the rules; if Melissa insists something remain private, private it will remain.

Tabitha glances around, and says quietly, “She’s not going to be a problem, is she?”

“She’s mostly but not entirely convinced it’s a refuge for abused trans women,” Shahida says, “but we’ve asked her not to pry and she won’t. She knows Em’s safety depends on it. She’s just—”

“She’s just being Rachel,” Melissa says, looking back along the path, as if she can still see her.

“We can poll the sponsors,” Tabby says, “and discuss bringing her in. That’s the usual way we do things,” she adds, leaning around Melissa to look at Shahida. “Although, lately, women have just been sort of barging in.”

“Excuse me,” Shahida says as they pass the shuttered Student Union Bar, “I didn’t ‘barge’ anywhere; I was invited in. By you, actually!”

“Potato, pot-ah-to.”

 

* * *

 

Steph’s still new enough to heels that the stairs are rather tricky, but she has only one flight to manage, and with Pippa and Paige steadying her, each taking an arm, it’s not so bad. And she feels like a débutante when she walks unsteadily into the dining hall, a beautiful woman on each arm (and, she sternly reminds herself, a beautiful woman herself balanced carefully between them), which is a sensation worth almost tripping and breaking her neck for.

The dining hall’s been relit with candles and fairy lights, and while on closer inspection the candles are all fake — presumably to prevent the many florid sleeves she can see from precipitating disaster — the effect is still quite magical. Since she last passed through someone’s set up a Christmas tree near the fireplace and decorated it in the traditional fashion, although Steph suspects the angel on top is probably altered in some way, in service of one or other of the Hall’s apparently endless (and exceedingly tasteless) running gags. She decides not to ask about it.

Before they can step over the threshold into the hall, one of the sponsors Steph very nearly recognises holds out her forearm to bar them from entry.

“Hold on,” she says, while Steph admires her pant suit and tries to remember her. She identifies her as Charlie, one of the second-year sponsors and the one who was on duty the day Melissa came home, in time for her to pluck from over the doorway a telltale green leaf. “Mistletoe,” Charlie says, waving it. “Indira had the second years take it all down earlier. Apparently they missed one.”

“That seems a little mean,” Steph says. “Aren’t they helping cook, too? They seem to get all the shit work.”

Charlie shrugs. “It was almost definitely them who put it all up in the first place.”

“Where did they even get it? They’re not allowed outside yet, right?”

“Mostly not,” Pippa mutters.

Nadine, one of the second-year sponsors Steph knows only by sight, swishes up in the fanciest dress Steph’s yet seen — it has a train! — and loops her arms around Charlie’s waist. “The mistletoe’s plastic,” she says, over Charlie’s shoulder. “One of the second years got into the boxes of decorations in storage.”

Charlie nods. “We’re also missing a whole pack of fairy lights and a rubber Santa.”

“And yes,” Nadine says with a shudder, “before you ask, we have checked Mia’s room.”

Charlie leans her head back to rest on Nadine’s shoulder. “You poor thing.”

“Almost two more years of Mia to go,” Nadine mutters. “Kill me.”

“You could always graduate her early,” Pippa says. “Surely she’s girly enough for Bea already?”

Nadine breathes heavily through her nose. “Pippa, it took me thirty minutes to give Aunt Bea the background in the relevant memes and—” she grumbles in her throat for a moment, “—‘shitposts’ — pardon my French — to comprehend the concept of ‘programmer socks’, and at the end of it all she looked at me over her gin and she said, ’Nadine, that simply will not do.’ I’m to turn Mia into a proper lady if it’s the last thing I do, and it might well be.”

“You don’t have to take everything Beatrice says so seriously,” Paige says.

“Spoken like someone who has never had to explain certain very specific memes to Bea.” Nadine tugs on Charlie, pulls her away into the room so the girls have room to pass. “Pippa, Paige,” she says, “you look lovely, as always. Steph, you look wonderful. And…” She pauses for a moment, and Charlie nudges her and nods. Nadine continues, more quickly, less sure of herself, “I wanted to thank you.”

“Oh?” Steph says. Pippa squeezes her hand.

“I’ve been thinking about how to put this,” Nadine says, half to herself, before looking Steph in the eye. “You’re a transgender woman. One who knew herself before she even walked through our doors. One who had to live with the knowledge of herself as trans for twenty-one years. I can’t imagine how lonely that must have been. How difficult. And yet—” she makes the little noise in her throat again, the one Steph’s starting to think is how she creates a pause so she can assemble her words, “—you don’t judge us. Since you were outed, since our respective truths became clear, you haven’t once impugned our womanhood—” Charlie coughs and nudges her again, “—or whatever other genders we might coalesce around, and it would have been entirely your right to do so.”

“Um,” Steph says, “I don’t understand.”

Charlie’s the one to hug Nadine now, with careful attention paid to the lines of her dress.

“We are all here for a reason,” Nadine says, “and you know this. But you have steadfastly refused to use it against us or to elevate yourself above us. For the sake of our second years, I must thank you. Their senses of themselves, even their genders, are still… delicate. Judgement, even implicit judgement, could have harmed them. So…” She curtseys, slow and deep, and Charlie stifles a giggle. “Thank you, Stephanie Riley.”

“Well,” Steph says, knowing she ought to respond and buying time to come up with something, “the thing is, um, well, it’s just… I know what it’s like to need to, um, to become—”

“I know,” Nadine says smoothly. “You don’t need to say it. You could so easily have been less generous with us, Stephanie, and it would have hurt our girls so much.”

Lost for words, Steph resorts to the only thing she can think of: she returns Nadine’s curtsey. It feels a little strange to do it in heels, and really it’s more of a dip, and she has to rely on Pippa’s steadying hand to be sure she doesn’t wobble, but Nadine is delighted, anyway, and that’s what’s important.

“Bless you, Stephanie,” Nadine says.

“You get used to her,” Charlie stage-whispers.

 

* * *

 

It hurt to leave Rachel back there, to be picked up by her dad and go back to a family that doesn’t know anything about, well, anything, but it would be worse to bring her to the Christmas Eve dinner. Melissa’s been to these before, twice when required and once, unaccountably, of her own accord, and she knows how rowdy they can get; the story Rach has been telling herself about Dorley would simply not survive contact with the assembled sponsors of Dorley Hall.

Which sucks. Because now she’s back here, now she’s starting to tie together the threads of her lives old and new, Melissa’s getting greedy; she wants everyone to know her, and she wants everyone precious to her to know each other.

Impossible, yes, but she can dream. Shahida might well have come to terms with the operation here with surprising ease, but Rachel’s still an unknown, one she doesn’t have the right to risk.

Confine your selfish impulses to your imagination for once, Melissa.

She’s so lost in her thoughts she doesn’t notice the approach of the Hall until she’s almost inside the front doors, and Shahida catches her instinctive flinch. There’s a residual intimidation to the place, one Melissa hasn’t quite purged, and while normally she has it under control, it retains its tendency to unsettle her.

“You okay, Em?”

Melissa nods as decisively as she can. Rationally, there’s nothing left here to scare her. Her intake have matured into the people she might have hoped they would, had she allowed herself to dwell on their futures overmuch, and even Aunt Bea’s mystique has worn away with time. And Abby… She’s not here tonight. Christine says she’s been avoiding the place lately, and Melissa’s inferred she’s been spending time with her family. Her real family.

And that hurts, too. That’s what they used to call each other.

“Yeah,” she says, “I’m okay. I just haven’t been to one of these big get-togethers in a while.”

“I sympathise,” Tabby says, waiting in the doorway. “I’d much rather be spending Christmas Eve with my boyfriend than with you bitches — no offence — but, alas.”

“Poor you,” Shahida says. “Really, Em? You’re okay?”

“I’m okay.”

Shahida clings to her all the way inside, both hands wrapped around Melissa’s left arm, plausibly for warmth. Melissa leans into her, choosing to be grateful for what and who she has.

Shy’s here. Steph’s here. Abby, Rachel, Amy… Dreams for another day. At least they are all within reach.

They have to separate as they enter the kitchen, and not just because of the heat from the AGA; there are enough people ferrying things around that they’re obliged to wait to be allowed to pass, and by the time Aisha finally waves them through, Melissa and Shahida are both sweating. Tabby, rather more sensibly, has taken the front stairs, but Melissa wants to check something: someone said Steph was going to be here tonight.

They haven’t spent as much time together as either of them wanted. It’s understandable. Steph’s busy with Aaron, who by all accounts has been undergoing a series of pivotal identity shifts — ahead of schedule — and, what’s more, she has to keep up appearances for the rest of the boys, who still think her one of them. She can’t exactly go for jaunts above ground whenever she chooses. And Melissa’s been occupied with Shahida and Rachel. Yes, she could and probably should have taken matters into her own hands and gone downstairs to visit Steph, but she doesn’t ever want to see that ugly concrete prison ever again.

At the thought of it she has to stop for a second, and Shahida stops with her, still holding her, still providing an anchor.

The time pressure’s getting to her. Not long until she has to go back to Manchester, back to work, back to a life that doesn’t have room for Steph or Shy or Rachel or Abby, a life that feels increasingly threadbare the longer she stays away from it… So she needs to confirm for herself that Steph’s going to be here tonight, or else she’ll need to start making serious plans to swallow her fears and re-enter the basement.

When they step through into the dining hall — and are immediately encouraged to step to one side, so the flow of people in and out can continue — it takes Melissa long enough to locate Steph that Shahida finishes struggling out of her own jacket and starts pulling Melissa’s off her shoulders. Eventually she spots her, all the way over at the other side of the dining hall, entering from the stairs with Pippa and Paige and talking with a pair of sponsors.

One of them’s Charlie, who was there the day Melissa made an idiot of herself. Maybe she’ll wait.

Shahida bumps shoulders with her and passes over her folded-up jacket. “How long do we have before we need to be ready?” she asks.

“A bit over an hour, I think,” Melissa says, trying not to sound too preoccupied.

“That’s good, because— Oh! Look! There’s Steph! She’s… she’s curtseying! Em, do you know how adorable that is?”

Melissa smothers a laugh, because, yes, the sight is so adorable she thinks she might die.

When Charlie and the other sponsor leave Steph and her friends to it, Melissa and Shahida give them a few moments to themselves before trotting up. Melissa can’t help the smile on her face: Steph looks incredible.

She’s wearing a chic black number that artfully covers for her flat chest and developing figure, and she’s paired it with a pair of boots Melissa badly needs to borrow. Her makeup is accented to match her hair colour and her hair itself is tied back, with a fringe teased out and a ponytail that curls ringlets around the base of her neck.

Steph rushes forward to embrace her, stumbling on small heels she’s unaccustomed to, and Melissa and Shahida catch her together.

“Sorry,” Steph says, and she sounds better than she did the last time they saw each other, clearer and more confident, and that’s great; it means that not only has she been practising, but she has access to somewhere she feels safe to do so.

“No running in the torture facility!” someone calls out from the other side of the dining hall, and Steph, once she’s freed from Melissa and Shahida’s support, throws a finger in their direction, to much laughter.

“Someone’s started early,” Shahida mutters.

“Someone always does,” Melissa says. “Hey, Steph. You look great.”

“Thanks!” She takes another step away from them and attempts a slow and careful twirl. “Don’t you just love the dress? And the hair! The hair’s my favourite part. It’s kind of a preview of what I’ll have in, um—” she pauses as she comes to rest, steadied by Pippa’s hand, and frowns as she thinks, “—like, maybe two years?”

“It’s not real?” Shahida asks.

“Everything before the ponytail is hers,” Paige says. “The ponytail is hers, too, but it comes off for cleaning.”

“Ta-da,” Steph says, wiggling her hands.

“Gorgeous,” Melissa says, and Steph beams at her.

“You two need to get changed,” Paige says, checking the time on her phone before slipping it back into a slim, dark green shoulder bag that matches her dress, and while Melissa’s aware she probably should answer she suddenly can’t because she’s properly looking at Paige’s dress for the first time and it’s temporarily robbed her of all reason.

It looks like it ought to be obscene. Paige is taller than Melissa by a reasonable distance and almost as thin, and her dress hugs tight to the shape of her, emphasises the curve of her back and her buttocks, clings to her shoulders and her upper arms. But it covers her from shoulder to ankle, with a modest slit to the lower thigh, and while the fabric sheers in a few places it is mostly opaque. All that’s actually exposed is her clavicle.

Paige, aware of the scrutiny, juts her hip out and smiles.

“Wow,” Shahida says.

Melissa can’t help but agree. “Um,” she says.

“Stop gawking,” Steph says, “both of you. She’s spoken for.”

“Speaking of,” Pippa says, poking at Steph and pointing across the room, “look who it is.”

All of them turn around at once, to see someone tentatively emerging from the basement with Maria. Melissa’s seen pictures of Aaron so she knows what he looks like — or what he looked like when he first arrived at Dorley, anyway; she hasn’t wanted to go scrubbing around the security footage, and she’s not even sure she’d be given access if she asked — but even disregarding the highly unusual nature of his presence here at all, she never expected to see him looking like that.

“Holy crap,” Steph whispers.

 

* * *

 

Stenordale Manor’s not the largest single building he’s ever done guard duty in, but it’s by far the biggest he’s ever had to patrol as part of such a small team. Still a cushy job, though, what with the access codes and the keys being restricted solely to him and Dorothy Marsden, and with the building being an ostensibly civilian dwelling that nevertheless can be locked up almost as tight as any Silver River facility. On any other assignment he’d be checking in with staff, he’d be walking his routes, he’d be watching the cameras, but here? They have exactly three prisoners in two groups, and neither group knows about, nor has access to, the other. And the staff? A nervous but obedient soldier, also from Silver River and subordinate to him, and a pair of old bats who are content to let him get on with things as he sees fit. He’s due a visit from his CO at some unspecified point in the future but the assignment is considered high priority but low risk, and the chain of command runs, unusually, right through the civilian, Dorothy Marsden. Fine by him; one more thing he doesn’t have to think about. If the doors stay locked and the windows stay closed, he’s done his job.

They make him confine his smoking to the room out by the quad, though. He and Callum have designated it a rec room, dragged in a telly and some sofas and chairs, plugged in a mini-fridge, and replaced the locks on all the doors, just in case any of their charges happen to wander this way. Wouldn’t matter if they did, of course; even if they somehow got in and caught him smoking and got out the window before he could stop them, they’d be in the quad, and there’s nowhere to go from there. And then he’d get to try out the taser he’s been issued.

The room next door even has a snooker table, and last week he found a box full of DVDs of some of the weirdest porn he’s ever seen. It’s the fucking life.

Well, not quite. There’s a tin of Guinness with his name on it, but he’s technically on duty for another few hours yet, and while the old woman spends a lot of time asleep and the slightly younger one, Frankie, gets her kicks mostly from bothering the maid, there’s always the chance he’ll be needed for something. Callum, the prick, cracks open a Foster’s and shoots him a shit-eating grin; he’s been off-shift for over an hour already.

“Cheer up, mate,” Callum says, as he pours his lager into a pint glass and absolutely wrecks the head, “it might never happen.”

“What gives you the impression that I’m glum, Callum, son?”

Callum throws the empty Foster’s tin at the bin and misses. The lad is absolute shit, honestly. “It’s the way you’re staring into space and saying absolutely fucking nothing,” he says.

“I’m thinking, aren’t I? Contemplating.”

“Yeah?”

“Yeah.”

“Right.”

Jake ignores the sceptical face Callum’s pulling and snatches up his cigarettes and lighter from the table beside him. “Crack the window, would you, Cal?” he says.

“You’re supposed to lean out when you smoke those,” Callum says, but he puts down his pint and he gets up and he fucking does it anyway. “It stains the wallpaper.”

Jake lights up. “What does her nibs even care about that, anyway? It’s not like this is her place. And when she shuffles off and head office take full possession they’re not going to care about the fucking wallpaper, are they? Especially not when it’s of this—” he leans forward in his chair, squinting, pretending to examine the wall with an expert’s eye, “—uninspiring vintage.”

Callum shrugs. “I guess it is ugly.”

“It looks like my nan’s bedroom,” Jake says, “and she decorated in the nineteen-seventies. And she’s dead.” He tries to blow a smoke ring and fails. “Whole house has got old woman smell, anyway. Silver River’ll probably rip out all the wallpaper just to get rid of the stink.”

“Right.” Callum hops channels on the muted telly for a minute and sips at his lager. “Look, Jake,” he says eventually, “is this… right?”

Here we go. The young ones get like this sometimes. And, yeah, it’d be a stretch to call Callum young, but he’s got that young feel, that sliver of childlike wonder that suggests to Jake that he hasn’t been punched in the face enough. Time to humour the stupid bastard. “Is what right?”

“Valerie— Vincent. Fuck, I don’t know. The maid. She said she was innocent. She said she’s been in captivity for over thirty years. She—”

“You believe everything a pretty woman tells you, Callum?”

“Well, no, but—”

“Hah, sorry; a pretty man.”

“Hey. She’s— Hey.”

Jake’s laugh becomes a cough, the cigarette smoke exiting him in vaporous, staccato gasps. “I saw the video, Cal. You walked right up to her and you called her by her— fuck, what do they say these days? I remember from sensitivity training. Tip of my tongue. Hah, Cal, I know what you want on the tip of your tongue.”

“Jake—”

“Deadname! You deadnamed her, Cal, and good for fucking you. If you want her, you need to establish power over her, mate. It’s a good start.”

“I don’t want her.”

“Leave it. I’ve seen the other video. The one where you practically tried to get in her girly little knickers.”

“That was orders.”

“Orders were to win her trust,” Jake says. “Which, I might add, you royally screwed up. Oh, don’t worry—” he waves a hand, scatters ash on the carpet as he does so, “—the old woman doesn’t give a shit. I was there when she reviewed the footage. She thought it was funny. In fact,” he adds with a leer, “I think she was a little bit turned on. Vincent Valerie Barbier the Maid knows she can’t expect anything useful from you and that’s almost as good as stringing her along.”

“What’s the other woman doing with her, then? Frances?”

“Frankie?” Jake shrugs and stubs out his cigarette. “No clue. She and Dorothy are thick as thieves, though. She won’t be doing anything that hasn’t been sanctioned. Not unless she wants to end up like everyone else who ever came through here.”

Callum finishes his beer, and burps. “That’s just it. Doesn’t matter if she’s a man or a woman or whatever. This feels wrong.”

“Does it?” Jake exclaims. “Does it, indeed? Cal, how many people’ve you killed?”

“Two.”

“Name them.”

“What?”

“What were their names, Callum?”

“I don’t know.”

“Did they have wives? Kids? Dogs? A school run? Were they on the PTA?”

“I don’t know.”

“You know what that tells me, Cal?” Jake says. “That you don’t actually give a shit. Let me guess, they were in the way of the job, so you did them, yes?”

“Yeah. Mostly.”

“Because the job — and your precious little life — was more important than whoever those poor bastards were, yes?”

“Yeah.”

“Well, then. It’s the same deal. She’s the job. Val’rie. And so’s the kid, Declan, and the wanker from Prickinville. And this is a priority assignment, Cal; don’t let the small size of our little gang fool you. If you fuck up, you’ll get sanctioned. Do you want to be sanctioned, Cal?”

“No.”

“Then do the fucking job. Don’t start developing morals, Cal. Don’t start thinking. Just do the job. And cheer up! Your little maid wife Vincent’s making us Christmas dinner tomorrow.”

“I’m not interested in her!”

Jake snorts. “Why not?”

“Because she’s— he’s a man.”

“Does she look like a man, Cal? No? Then does it matter? We’re here for two years, lad, and it’s not like we get a lot of time off to go on the pull. Beggars can’t be choosers. If you want to have a go, don’t mind me. I won’t tell a soul.”

“She’s got a dick, Jake.”

He puts on his most patronising voice and says, “Then ask her very nicely if you can do her up the arse.”

“I don’t—”

“Shush, now,” Jake says, nodding at the laptop, which shows Dorothy Marsden walking the corridor down to the rec room with her usual slightly surprising speed — not exactly fast, but fast for her age — with Declan in tow. “Company.”

Minutes later, he’s escorting Ms Marsden out to the bungalow at the end of the Run, a blue rucksack slung over his shoulder and his anticipation rising. She asked him if he’s had the standard field medical training, and he said yes. She asked him if he knows how to perform a simple injection, and he said of course. And then he realised what she was asking, and now he’s walking carefully, his boredom replaced with a kind of excitement he’s only just starting to become familiar with.

At first he didn’t get it. With Declan she just calls him up to her room, or wherever it is she’s currently decaying, and has him serve her, or listen to her talk, or dress up for her, and the first couple of times he retained his disinterest, sitting in the corner of the room with his gun ready, in his usual role as the implicit threat, the punishment for noncompliance.

But, a few sessions in, as Declan started to become verbal again, as he started pushing back in the most minor ways, as he started to fight, Jake started to see the appeal. To take someone like Declan, the kind of man you might see down the pub or even work with at somewhere like Silver River, all barrel-belly and attitude, and transform him into your servant, girly and submissive and eager— no, desperate to please… There’s power there. Power and, he had to admit to himself, arousal. And then, one session, when Dorothy secured a minimum level of cooperation from the lad by promising that if he behaves she can one day set him right, put him on testosterone, give him back (almost) everything that was taken from him, Jake had to relieve himself in the nearest bathroom immediately after. The last traces of defiance had departed the man, but not the fear, not the hatred, not the determination, and Jake’s known for a while that when someone loathes you but must still conform to your whim, it’s intoxicating. What he didn’t know, what he’d never had the opportunity to find out, is that when that person, that creature, is also becoming week by week a compliant and beautiful woman, well, that’s not just the cherry on top; that’s the whole fucking cake.

Maybe the perfect woman can’t be found. But you can make her. And who knew the tools to do so were in the hands of someone like Dorothy Marsden?

The promise to Declan is a lie, of course. There’s no help coming for him, no testosterone injections, no eventual re-masculinisation, and if the lad was halfway bright he would have realised this. He would have taken one look at Valerie and understood he was looking into his future. But he’s proud, and proud in a way that Jake can almost relate to: men don’t let this happen to them. But perhaps a man would survive, would refuse to give in.

That’s probably why Valerie seems like such an ordinary woman; she was always a pussy, even before. And where’s the fun in that? Declan, however, a man so much like Jake that to read his file is like looking back to Jake’s own youth, now there’s the sport. His attitude, his hatred… He’s practically begging to be broken.

Trevor’s injection passes for Jake in a blur. Dorothy made him promise: kid gloves. Trev’s earmarked for someone else, and he’s going to be trained and then he’s going to be shipped out, and while, sure, forcing his compliance and injecting him is relatively satisfying, Jake can’t get another face out of his head: wide-eyed, dark-haired, and with an expression of painted, pained loathing.

Declan’s the new Vincent, and Dorothy’s not got the energy to train him as she’d like, and from now on, Frankie’s going to have her hands full with Trevor. So what if Dorothy lets Jake have a go at him?

He’ll ask. He’ll make his case. But he’s pretty confident. He knows he can make a pretty fucking good woman out of Declan Shaw.

 

* * *

 

He almost has a heart attack right there in the doorway. The dining hall — what he has to assume is the dining hall, anyway, since it matches Steph’s description and it’s full of people in pretty dresses and it’s right where he was told to expect the dining hall and, Jesus, he’s feeling really faint — is so fucking huge and the ceiling is so fucking high and it’s so packed with people, and, wait, the ceiling is high? How does that work? It’s like a whole extra storey! Does it extend into the next floor, and the rooms on the first floor just have to snake around it? Or is there, like, a secret extra floor with storerooms and stuff, because it doesn’t look like the kitchen is unusually tall, so maybe—

“Aaron?”

Maria takes his weight as he staggers, and he clears his head, wants to apologise to her for needing her in such a way when she’s still technically in recovery from her injury, but it’s just these shoes, man, and it’s not that they’re especially unusual but, come on, he hasn’t worn shoes at all for so long and now his toes are getting pinched and his heel is all tight and he wants nothing more than to stretch his arches and how, honestly, actually, is he supposed to concentrate on walking when he’s just been dressed and primped and dragged out into a room the size of a school gym after being cooped up in a basement for three months?

“Aaron!”

There’s so many beautiful women in the room — and, yes, attractive nonbinary people, too, he’s had the lecture from Maria and the reminder from Steph and he knows that not everyone who graduates is or remains a woman, but it’s fine because Donna, whom he doesn’t know but whom he is assured is very nice, she’s Jodie’s sponsor, and he doesn’t know Jodie either, but he’s assured she’s very nice as well, Donna made pronoun pins, and while probably not everyone will be wearing them, Maria told him he could rely on anyone who prefers something other than she/her to indicate it somewhere on their person, because it’s just less awkward that way, and he can do it, too, if he wants, but when Maria asked if he wanted Donna to make him up a he/him pin he prevaricated for long enough that Maria kissed him on the forehead and told him not to worry about it.

“Aaron?”

Start again. There’s so many beautiful people in the room, and so many of them are looking right at him, and he feels suddenly both presumptuous and out of place, like he dared to walk into this hall as himself, dressed the way he is, the way he asked Maria to dress him, and the laughter or the derision or the cruelty is surely just about to start—

“Hey, Aaron,” Maria says, right in his ear, and her breath and the startling loudness of her voice is enough to—

“Aaron!”

Steph?

“Wake up, kid,” Maria says, squeezing his arm, and he looks at her, responds to her smile with one of his own, finding within himself enough remaining certainty to make it through this one meal, this one evening, because it’s important. For a hundred reasons, it’s important. And here comes Steph, with Paige and Pippa alongside her and a couple of people he doesn’t know who either haven’t got dressed up yet or are both attending the Christmas Eve party cosplaying as that one American Instagram woman who goes viral every autumn for her beige overcoat and her warm boots and her pumpkin spice Starbucks, but who cares about the others because Steph’s wearing a fucking dress, and she looks incredible, and if he wasn’t feeling faint before — and he fucking was — then he’d surely be practically falling over now just from the sight of her.

“You’ve got this,” Maria whispers. “Just remember: I’m proud of you, and so is she.”

And Maria lets him go, lets him stand on his own two feet, and he thinks she should probably be even more proud of him for managing it.

He steps forward and doesn’t stumble.

Fuck yeah.

Aaron takes a deep breath, straightens his tie, smooths down his tuxedo, and holds out his hands, ready to accept the embrace of the woman he loves.